What is smartd?

[Tom Diehl]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Thom Paine wrote:

> On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 04:39, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 04:35, zbert wrote:
> > > During my boot sequence, this daemon always fails. Can anybody clue me 
> > > in as to what it is and how I might fix it?
> > 
> > It's a monitor for IDE hard disks.  I've also seen it fail to start in
> > some cases, but only on systems that don't actually have any IDE hard
> > disks (CDroms don't count.)
> > 
> 
> Mine fails as well. I don't have any IDE disks in my machine. I have 2
> SATA drives and 1 IDE dvd-rom and 1 IDE dvd-ram drive. Would I be okay
> disabling this service as well?

Bottom line is you do not need smartd. Having said that, if your devices support
it, IMO you should run it. If properly setup (and enabled in the BIOS) it can
give you warnings of impending disk failure. There are numerous links available
via google that will explain this better than I can. Try googleing for smartd.

Smartd will for sure monitor smart enabled SCSI disks. I do not know about
SATA but since this is a new technology my guess would be that it will monitor
them as well. IIRC, there was also a series of articles in Linux Journal a few
months back on this.

HTH,

Tom