The TL;DR answer is yes, there are some hard drive SMART values that can indicate failure is likely, but they vary by model and don't necessarily show before failure.
yeah, I was wondering if there were measurables that could be correlated with failure before SMART kicked in, even if they were something like date of year, or location of manufacture, or shipping route they took. :P
Generally the most common measurable is sector reallocation errors. This comes from various random things going wrong at the wrong time and the disk re-allocates a new sector from the spare pool to deal with one that has gone bad. In operation, our disks at Blekko pick up sector reallocation errors at a low statistical rate that picks up prior to total failure. Since our infrastructure is triply redundant (three disks hold a copy of every piece of data) we can simply reformat drives which develop sector errors. If you plot the time between sector errors developing over the life of the drive, it gets shorter rapidly as the drive as nearing complete failure. Sometimes however there is no warning, the drive simply fails. As with my previous experience at Google and NetApp before that, there is a small rise in early failure (infant mortality) then a long tail toward a steep failure rate after about 10 years.
