At Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:57:59 -0600 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
I notice that the smartd service is not running by default on a new installation. But palimpsest seems to get updated statistics every so often as when I check the statistics on a drive it says "last updated" some number of minutes ago.
So if smartd isn't running, where does palimpsest get its information from and what is updating it?
Second question, what would enabling the smartd service gain me that I don't have right now?
Almost all modern disk are S.M.A.R.T capable. What this means is that various information about the disk, mostly relating to its health can be monitored. This includes things like sector errors. If smartd is running root will get E-Mail if/when something (however minor) happens to the disk.