Can SMART predict every failure?

• A. Yes — SMART can predict all hardware failures.
• B. Only electrical failures.
• C. No — some failures are sudden or electrical.
• D. Yes, except for software failures.

Answer: (C)

SMART tracks health indicators that tend to degrade gradually, giving forewarning before many problems appear. It’s useful for spotting trends like rising read errors, reallocations, or overheating, which lets you replace drives before a full failure.

However, not every failure follows a measurable decline in those metrics. some failures happen suddenly or are caused by electrical issues such as power surges, corrupted power delivery, or other instantaneous faults that SMART doesn’t predict because they don’t show a progressive warning on health attributes. That’s why SMART can’t predict all failures. Software problems and other non-hardware faults fall outside the scope of SMART as well.