How Smartd related to Hard disk driver

[smithaeapen]

I want to use smartd for monitoring my hard disk regularly. What is the interaction of smartd with the hard disk driver that is in use. Whether the hard disk driver should be smart enabled or only the hard disk. Will any one help me in this.

[Roxoff]

I thought SMART worked at a very low level, the system took care of it for you and smartd monitored the output of that system? SMART is enabled and disabled through the BIOS, and as long as it's turned on and the daemon is running, you'll get advanced notice of upcoming hard disk failure.

Why do you need to know this? Do you have a commercial purpose for this, or is this part of an academic project?

[Manko10]

I would not rely on S.M.A.R.T.
It is a very handy tool for seeing the current healthiness of your hard disk but you should not use it in any way to predict when your drive might fail. Hard disks can fail at any moment, regardless of the current healthiness.
smartd is just a monitoring tool. The man page of smartd (smartd(8)) gives you more information.

[Roxoff]

I would not rely on S.M.A.R.T.
It is a very handy tool for seeing the current healthiness of your hard disk but you should not use it in any way to predict when your drive might fail. Hard disks can fail at any moment, regardless of the current healthiness.
smartd is just a monitoring tool. The man page of smartd (smartd(8)) gives you more information.

Good advice. You can rely on SMART, it can give you advance warning of some kinds of impending HDD failure. But hard disks can certainly fail without any information from SMART whatsoever - SMART provides more information, it doesn't provide all information.

[smithaeapen]

Thanks for replying. I need to use a smart demon as the part of project. So there is no dependency of smartd on the hard disk driver...is it so ? Then before using the demon we are enabling the disk into smart mode....In the manufacturing time of the hard disk the manufacture will be adding some sensors(temperature monitoring)...etc along with it . There is no further modification in the driver of the hard disk for providing smart functionality.. Please correct me if I am wrong.

One more thing , the demon will interact with whom? with the hard disk driver or firmware....It is continuously polling the status by interacting with whom? Please help me in understanding the process.

[Roxoff]

I'm not sure of the inner workings of the smartd demon, or how SMART works at a nuts-and-bolts level.

If you're doing this commercially then as part of your investigation you can pull the source code for the smartd demon and see what is going on. This would probably be the best way for you to find out exactly what you need.

[smithaeapen]

Ok fine. I will check the source code.