Old hard disk testing protocol, SMART monitoring software

I have some Samsung 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB hard disk from ~2009 which have been sitting mostly idle in a backup machine for all these years, some have had more activity than others.

I would like to test their health and then put them in a more high activity environment. Looking at their SMART data reveals they are mostly healthy, some with a Calibration retry count or Interface CRC Error Count (I think from a dodgy cable)...
What would be the best way to test them from here? Something like clearing all the SMART data then running some write/read tests and checking values work? If so what software combo do people recommend.

Or would it just be best to go about following the advice from the "Just bought a new drive - how to test before putting into production environment" threads. I am just not sure if starting with an already 'old' drive requires a different approach.

Secondly,

I am usually quite lazy with monitoring hard disk SMART attributes, I rely on having backups and if a disk dies then just restoring from that. This works fine on my personal PC of just a few disks but I am trying to set up a server for the house (the idea is to use those old disks), and was wondering if there is some windows 8 auto-smart monitoring software that will do something like alert me if values jump suspiciously. I tried HDD sentinel in the past but found it far too heavy, if there is anything far more light weight and simple that would be great.

Thanks