To really decode SMART information correctly, you need very detailed information from the drive. I used to do this kind of stuff (about 10 years ago, for a large file/storage system), and we had detailed interface manuals for the drives (under NDA), and regular direct contact with their engineers. We would literally write e-mails to our engineer friends at Seagate/WD/Sandisk/Sandforce/... a few times a month, have phone meetings, and get good answers. Obviously, this approach won't work on (a) SSDs or hard disks intended for the consumer market, and (b) individual end user customers. You can try to see whether full interface manuals are available for these drives; Seagate often publishes them (to anyone) for their drives, but I don't know whether the SMART data is fully documented there, or only the SCSI/SATA command set.
Doing this right is a heck of a lot of work. In a business setting, I would assign an engineer for a month or a quarter.
Why did Fry's Electronics go out of business anyway? So sad!
Combination of things. First, the whole business model of retailing white goods (housewares), electronics (stereos...), computers, and electronics components fell apart slowly between when they started in the 80s, and when they shut down in the last few years. A lot of consumers didn't want to shop there, since the store was so ridiculously badly run (disorganized, lots of returned goods rewrapped and back on the shelves, the folks who worked there had no clue and a bad attitude). They were famously obnoxious about refusing returns ... and when they did take returns, they would put them back on the shelves. But the real problem was top management. They had a lot of money to start with, since the Fry family had made a fortune on a grocery store chain. They invested it stupidly, into buying too many stores (including the former "Incredible Universe" stores), and putting too much money into making them look fancy.
One of the reasons I liked them: They used to stock chips, electronic parts (breadboard, soldering stuff), resistors, transistors, cases. You could be an electronics hobbyist using them as the main supply depot. But: The number of parts they needed to stock was HUGE (the 74xxx series of chips alone is a thousand different things, if you count 74, LS, HCT ... varieties), so they were losing money on having too much stuff with low profit margins. It was insanely labor intensive for them. The moment internet ordering took off, and distributors (such as Anthem/Avnet/Digikey/Mouser/Newark/... ) became consumer-friendly, that whole business collapsed, and they didn't figure it out.
And to a large extent, that was the story of their bad management: They didn't figure it out when the world changed. Amazon, Best Buy, Digikey, and computer stores all ate Fry's lunch, while the owners/executives were absent or clueless.
Add to that a whole slew of outright theft. One of their VPs (I think of purchasing) was a massive gambling addict, who stole about $150M from Fry's to feed his gambling habit. The court cases made the news all over. That's not terribly much money for a large retail chain, but it shows that management wasn't watching anything and not even noticing losses. Complete incompetence in the C-suite.
