I agree and have been doing some similar analysis on the backblaze dataset. I suppose you can use this for prediction but I'm personally just interested in post-hoc analysis and (1) getting better AFR estimates when failure counts are low + (2) exploring time-dependence of hazard functions with different priors (GP priors, etc.). This post and your comment have motivated me to make a post this weekend! Thanks!
You should check out this time-to-event neural network [1].
SMART seems to be extremely useless in practice. Manufacturers don't seem to expose actual failure statistics through it, likely for fear of making their product look bad.
SMART is a liar sometimes. I have first hand experience with faulty Seagate firmware and Equallogic SANs - where errant statistics caused disks to be ejected from the volumes before you could finish a rebuild. Nothing like watching 40TB of data disappear on multiple installations over the course of a few weeks!