[smartmontools-support] Performance hit of frequent smartctl -A listings

[Ivan L. Jr. <iva...@gm...>]

Hello,

I was wondering if it is a good idea to have monitoring system call smartctl -A /dev/sdX somewhat frequently on my drives to monitor drives temperatures. I'm thinking 2-5 minutes interval, but I'm wondering how much of a performance hit on a drive is smartctl -A.

In fact, I would love to monitor most of the values in in smartctl -A output, which could lead to about 17 calls each 5 minutes. I know this is a very dumb way to go about it, and some intermediary caching mechanism is perhaps a must, but still, how costly are these listings?

Ivan