What is smartd?

[Randy Kelsoe]

Tom Diehl wrote:

>>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.
>  
>

Actually, smart does not need to be enabled in BIOS. If it is enabled in 
BIOS, the BIOS will check the smart status of the drive on boot up, and 
if it finds a problem, it may disable or ignore the drive. smartd will 
still work if smart is disabled in BIOS.

>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.
>

If the drive is on a SATA controller that is using libata, smart will 
not work (yet). If the drive is using IDE mode, and the drive is 
supported, it should work.

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/#testinghelp