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I found a succinct articles on smartmontools and about what each of the tests does.

SMART tests with smartctl
https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/SMART_tests_with_smartctl

Analyzing a Faulty Hard Disk using Smartctl

https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Analyzing_a_Faulty_Hard_Disk_using_Smartctl

I ended up setting cron job to do the following.

@weekly /usr/sbin/smartctl -t short /dev/sda
@monthly /usr/sbin/smartctl -t long /dev/sda