Seagate 7200.10 drives - Cause for concern?

I bought 2 Seagate 7200.10 drives for my new build (sig rig). I was looking for something relatively cheap that didn't have to be the best of the best. So I trusted newegg's review points and I did some light searching on google and decided to go with these drives.

They do not score well at all in benchmarks, even in Vistas experience index they rate 5.6. I downloaded 2 apps that check the S.M.A.R.T. info and both said the drives arent in the greatest shape.

Using HDDlife pro:
My 160gb OS\Apps drive has 55% health status and 55% performance
My 500gb storage drive has 14% health status and 14% performance

Using S.M.A.R.T. IDE Guardian (SIGuardian) 1.7
Every S.M.A.R.T. value is way beyond the listed threshold for that value.

Is s.m.a.r.t. a reliable protocol or should I just ignore it?

I did read that these drives come with a slow firmware (AAK) which is not upgradable but I am shocked that these drives are reporting such terrible performance\health.

They seem to function fine, I play games with no stutters of any sort, XP\Vista\Ubuntu boot fine, nice and fast.

Is there possibly some extra SATA driver I need for my mobo or OS that can improve these issues? It's hard to believe that both drives can be defective.

I did remove the "Limit to 1.5gb\sec" jumper on the hdd's so it's not that causing the issue.

I'm just curious as to if you can really trust the SMART values to determine your drives health. As you said, if you've seen people complain in the past regarding SMART then I guess it's not just me. It's just hard to believe that 2 2-week old Seagate 7200 drives are in near-replacement condition with such poor performance ratings.

But yes, they do function fine in every day use which is all that matters. I am going to hold off on putting any important data on them without backing up first just in case. When I scan the discs for bad sectors and speed tests everything comes up 100% fine with no errors so SMART must just be a poorly developed system (IMO).

If you use the Seagate diagnostics (Seatools) and and it fails the Seagate SMART test, then Seagate says that they will replace it. They don't provide any analysis of the SMART parameters nor do they recognize anyone elses analysis, but they will replace the drive - no questions asked - if it fails their test.