Is it actually more often a hardware failure that causes filesystem corruption? I was more under the impression that misbehaving programs are more often the culprit. Then again, my experience is more in the desktop realm (as opposed to servers).
I've actually experienced both types of disk corruption problems almost simultaneously: I once tried to recover a program from a degraded floppy disk. I then made the mistake of trying to run it, at which point it happily gobbled up my hard drive's filesystem. Fortunately, my dad used to periodically have me spend hours backing up our sizeable 40 megabyte MFM hard drive onto 5.25" floppy disks, so we were back up and running within a few hours. Must have been a dozen years ago, but I learned my lessons:
1. It pays to make backups (but I still never do).
2. Never run any program that may be corrupted or infected. Just don't do it - it's not worth the risk.
3. 40 megabytes is big when you're backing it up onto floppy disks.
As for SMART, I've never seen it report a bad drive or any other problems, so I'm a bit skeptical about its usefulness.
Heh, I remember what it was: it was in that sliver of time between when I was still confined to my 8MHz 286 (a good 6 years old by that time - amazing how rarely you had to upgrade in the late 80s to be able to play the latest games), but after I acquired a copy of X-Wing from my cousin. I was trying to get a program working that used hard disk space as EMS (because my 286 only had 1 meg of RAM) so that I could hear the digitized speech in X-Wing on my new Sound Blaster 2.0. Soon after, we "borrowed" an old 386DX-33 (that's 33MHz) with around 16MB of RAM from my dad's work, and everything changed (in other words, I was finally able to play Doom!).
EDIT: I feel old.