Does querying drive's S.M.A.R.T. temperature data too often strain the disk or affect its performance in any way?

Hi,

I’m creating a script to monitor my hard drives temperatures (just for fun) in a NAS. For this I’m using hddtemp. This porgram polls the hard drives S.M.A.R.T. data for the last update temperature.

I notice the first call to hddtemp takes a litte while to complete. Probably because the devices are inactive. Subsequent calls to hddtemp are much faster.

Does reading disk S.M.A.R.T. data (e.g. using hddtemp) too often strain the disk or affect its performance in any way?

Hi, welcome to the community.

I’m not sure that attempting to read the S.M.A.R.T data too often on a drive can actually affect the performance of the drive too much that you will notice, but it may depend on how many read you perform on X amount of time.

If you are using one of the family of drives that have IntelliPower the first read could potentially be slower, also if by any chance your NAS turn the drives off after a set amount of time without use this could also translate in slower access time.

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