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Too much SMART polling bad?


Thronic

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This thread over at Spiceworks made me curious.

The residential guru on storage writes:

Quote

SMART on some drives can actually cause them to perform more poorly. SATA drives in a SATP enviroment will lock the entire PHY when a request has been made (blocking IO to all other drives on the same shared PHY). Given this can sometimes take SECONDS for a SMART journel to populate and return this can result in timeouts, bus crashes and other nasty things. Polling smart too hard is actually bad, and can murder performance, or create false failures in devices.

Anything real to this in a DP type setup?

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To be blunt, when talking about storage, it's a good idea to take things with a grain of salt.  There are a lot of misconceptions and myths that get perpetuated, even by smart and experienced people. 

Worse, is that some things may have been true at one point, but technology and the like improved, but people still believe what once held true.

That said, StableBit Scanner polls SMART data once a minute, by default.  And you can configure that interval, if you want.

As for the stuff mentioned, unless you have a bad drive (either failing, or poorly designed), I don't think that this is actually an issue on modern drives, and the issues mentioned are an exaggeration. 

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