Actually, if the disks were both from the same batch from the manufacturer, it's not all that surprising that they'd fail around the same time.
They've had the same manufacturing process, environment, and usage patterns. That's why I usually try to order identical model drives from different vendors.
My preferred course of action here is to contact the manufacturer, replace with better disks, restore from backup.
Nothing wrong with DD'ing either, but I'm usually in need of getting the service up ASAP.
Back in the day of the IBM Deskstars fiasco, I had an entire set of 8 disks go bad all within 6 weeks after 4 years of usage. I barely got out of that with my data intact.
You can't reliably.
Or rather, you have already done it with the options at your disposal.
As a study at google found out, failing disks do not necessarily show abnormal SMART values (The other way round however is more reliable: when they do, they will fail).
Keeping this aside for a moment, bear in mind that even though alot is standardized in computing, in reality there are bugs in both hard- and software, error margins which can accumulate, etc. The real world isn't perfect, and it's not unseen of hard disks not playing nice with particular controllers - and the other way round. Sometimes it's a question of a faulty firmware, sometimes some completely different system components not behaving, for example a sub-par PSU which barfs at particular load spikes. Or even temperature changes, age...the list could be expanded almost at will.
So, standard procedure here is to put the disk into a significantly different system configuration and re-run tests - but since you already have done so with the complete change of your system, you have correctly concluded that the disk must be at fault. (Unless you did not change everything else as you've told us - Cable/HBA comes to mind, in which case the assumption would not hold true).
Edit: I just realized that there is one option left; you can search if there are newer firmware revisions available for this disk drive than what's currently on your particular drive. If so, you may have a look at the change log pointing out possible problems in your case.
In conclusion, to establish with complete confidence (in this particular situation!) that the drive is misbehaving, you'll need to send it back to the manufacturer.
Best Answer
No.
S.M.A.R.T. attributes are made to be prevented from being altered with.
The S.M.A.R.T. system is maintained by the drive itself, so you cannot normally "reset" or "clear" SMART values. That, if possible in practice, your defeat part of its purpose.
You could in theory download the corresponding micro-code, alter what you need and re-write it, but that has a good chance of bricking your HDD. I'm sure there are some hack-around things that would do it, but most likely those would work on a very limited number of drives and present the risk I mentioned above.