Unnecessary Disk Polling
The smartd daemon (part of the smartmontools package) is a utility in Ubuntu designed to continuously monitor the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data of physical hard drives and solid-state drives. It runs in the background, periodically waking up the disks to check for hardware degradation, temperature warnings, or impending failure, and logs this information to syslog.
While absolutely critical for bare-metal servers and desktops to prevent data loss, smartd is entirely useless when running Ubuntu inside a Virtual Machine (VM). Virtual disks (like .vmdk or .qcow2 files) do not have physical hardware attributes to monitor; they cannot report S.M.A.R.T. data to the guest OS. Leaving the daemon running in a VM wastes CPU cycles, litters your syslog with error messages about unsupported devices, and provides zero benefit. The hypervisor handles physical disk health.
How to Disable the Smartd Daemon
You can stop and disable the service using systemctl.
- Open your Ubuntu Terminal or connect to your VM via SSH.
- Stop the currently running service:
sudo systemctl stop smartmontools.service(Note: the daemon is called smartd, but the systemd service name is usually smartmontools.service, though on some older setups it may be smartd.service).
- Disable the service to prevent it from starting automatically at boot:
sudo systemctl disable smartmontools.service- (Optional) Mask the service to ensure no other dependency attempts to start it:
sudo systemctl mask smartmontools.serviceThe daemon is now disabled, eliminating unnecessary disk polling errors from your virtual machine’s logs.