the most basic information that smart provides is the smart status. it provides only two values: "threshold not exceeded" and "threshold exceeded". often these are represented as "drive ok" or "drive fail" respectively. a "threshold exceeded" value is intended to indicate that there is a relatively high probability that the drive will not be able to honour its specification in the future – that is, the drive is "about to fail". the predicted failure may be catastrophic or may be something as subtle as the inability to write to certain sectors, or perhaps slower performance than the manufacturer's declared minimum.