How frequently should SMART be run on a disk

smarttruenas

I'm a software engineer, not a system admin, so if this question seems a little green you know why! 😉

As a personal project I've been working on a home NAS system using FreeNAS. One of the features of FreeNAS is the ability setup a SMART check to run ever X number of seconds. By default this is set to run every 1800 seconds (30 minutes). This seemed high to me though, is this really a reasonable value? I would think checking once every 6 hours or something would be reasonable enough…

So my question is: How frequently should a SMART check be run on a drive?

Best Answer

I'm not sure what you mean.

  • You can ask the disk to run a (SMART) self-test. This usually takes some time, and is somewhat stressful for the disk. I'd not recommend to run it more than once in a long while.

  • On the other hand, you can check the SMART status from the disk. In other words, this means "read the SMART meters from the disk". This operation is simple and fast, and can be run how many times you want.

Supposing you are asking for checking the SMART status, then every 60, 30, 15, 10 or 5 minutes, or whatever is good enough. It doesn't matter. In this case, it is more important WHAT will be done with such reading. Will it be logged? Will it be checked for failure and e-mailed when a failure is detected? After all, it makes little sense to read the status every minute if you, the admin, will only look at this once in a month.

If you need help, maybe the smartmontools project might be useful. (at least you can check its source code to see how often smartd reads the status)

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