# How to get smartd to run only once a day?



## Dre (Nov 4, 2010)

My goal is to get the smartd check to run once a day or so to verify that my discs are working.
The periodic check should be made by smartd.conf (sends an email if something is wrong). I would also like to get the status of my discs in the daily run output. I have this up and running today. What I donâ€™t want is for smartd to constantly check the discs since Iâ€™m spinning them down.

The annoying thing with smard is that it by default checks the disks every 30 min. 
`# smartd â€“i 86400` should change that interval to one day but it doesnâ€™t work for me. Donâ€™t know why. Itâ€™s not a good solution anyway since I canâ€™t specify when the check is made.. 

Even if I stops smartd I still get a message in the daily run telling me that the disks are OK. This to me indicates that the daily run output mearly reads the last result from the periodic smartd run. Can someone verify that itâ€™s the same thing with the check performed by smartd.conf?

The only thing Iâ€™ve come up with so far is to start smartd with a cron job an hour before the daily mail and the smartd.conf check. Then I stop smartd with another cron job after the check is made. However, I donâ€™t know how to verify if this actually works which is kind of scaryâ€¦

Isnâ€™t there a better way of doing this?


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