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I'm not sure why you wouldn't use smartd, which has sane defaults, can immediately alert based on arbitrary smart properties changing, and also handles scheduling smart tests. An arbitrary command can be run instead of sending email.

For example, reallocated sectors are not alerted on by default, so we added '-R 5!' to our smartd config. The full config we have is:

DEVICESCAN -a -s (L/../../6/01) -l selftest -l error -m <email> -M daily -M test -R 5!

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My familiarity with SMART was on the POST screen. I never ran any daemons; I didn't know they were a thing. Like so many other nerds that grew up in the 90s, we've all experienced data loss. At the best it was just some porn and the worst were those rare VHS tapes you ripped of random high school crap.

I feel like there were enough tools for users to simply monitor SMART stats, or awareness of how it works. Even in this article, it seems like a lot of analysis to see if reported flags are significant.

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