All SMART enabled drives have 3 very useful settings.
I noticed many years ago most drives (easily around 90%) I have access to come with only 1 setting enabled, eg. SMART = ON
Self testing and saving of the reports is generally disabled.
I wonder how common this is beyond my own experience, and ask that you look at your own drives and post here.
Unless your drives SMART data is current and accurate, what tends to happen is your OS only complains when the drive is almost about to die because it has become so bad.
No OS comes with built-in SMART checking only the ability to report errors when notified, which if you never run tests or use a SMART monitor may come too late.
I just checked on my laptop. I see the 3rd option is not visible either.
Odd as I can toggle it using HDD Guardian as a front end for SmartControl.
It definitely used to have all 3 in earlier versions of GSmartControl.
Some drives do not support keeping the logs, but it just means you can’t enable it if you try.
However as we can see, self-testing is as usual not enabled which is the main issue here.
Your drive is not going to report errors to to OS until it is failing, which is often too late.
I advise you enable it. If you use a desktop SMART monitor with its own logging, you won’t miss the saving of the scan history.
