From what I can tell SMART analysis, as supplied by testing tools comes in 2 forms, simple and complex. "Simple" reporting seems to be used on tools like Disk Utility, Scannerz, and SMARTReporter.

QUESTION: What should I be doing to monitor my hard drive? ANSWER: Of all the components that make up your computer, the hard drive should be considered the most important to maintain and monitor ...

I have a late 2006 (plastic) iMac. It started acting up a little so I ran Scannerz w/FSE on the drive to scan it, and sure enough it found bad sectors plus a fair number of sectors that are damaged ...