White papers and beliefs aside: I had installed SMARTReporter on my Mac with 4 internal drives, and shortly after installing it, got a notice that a drive was failing. Now, I don't really know what's going on internally with the S.M.A.R.T. firmware but I was given a window of time to clone (which is different from just a daily backup) the failing drive onto another drive and then watched as the failing drive died over several days, knowing the new drive had everything for certain.

SmartReporter gave a heads up that I would not have gotten otherwise. Is it full proof? Of course not; nothing is. But now I always have it sitting in my menubar on every Mac.

Also, the Google white paper is basically a statistical analysis that says, Drives tend to fail in the first 90 days or last for most of their expected read/write lifetimes, and there's no telling beforehand which ones will fail or why (when they do).

This free little utility saved me a lot of grief once so as an end-user I think it's a great tool to have.