How to Completely Disable the ‘smartd’ (S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring) Daemon in Ubuntu Server

The smartd daemon (part of the smartmontools package) is a system service in Ubuntu that continuously monitors the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) data of local hard drives and solid-state drives. It is designed to predict drive failures and alert administrators. However, if your Ubuntu Server is deployed as a Virtual Machine (VM) in a cloud environment (like AWS or Azure) or on a hypervisor (like VMware ESXi or Proxmox), the VM has no physical disks to monitor. The underlying physical storage arrays are managed by the hypervisor or cloud provider. In these virtualized environments, running smartd inside the guest OS is useless, generating unnecessary background polling and cluttering system logs with “device not supported” errors.

This guide explains how to completely disable the smartd daemon in Ubuntu Server.

Stop and Disable the SMART Daemon

To ensure your virtualized server stops attempting to probe non-existent physical hardware, we must halt the daemon and permanently remove it from the system boot sequence.

1. Log into your Ubuntu Server via SSH or local console using an account with sudo privileges.
2. First, stop the active service to terminate the current polling cycle:

   sudo systemctl stop smartmontools.service

   *(Note: The daemon is named `smartd`, but the systemd unit in Ubuntu is typically named `smartmontools.service` or `smartd.service` depending on the exact version. If the above fails, try `sudo systemctl stop smartd.service`)*
3. Next, disable the service so it is not initialized during the next boot sequence:

   sudo systemctl disable smartmontools.service

4. To guarantee that no cron jobs or arbitrary administrative commands can accidentally wake the daemon, mask the service unit:

   sudo systemctl mask smartmontools.service

Verify the Deactivation

By masking the service, you have effectively severed the S.M.A.R.T. polling agent from the operating system without needing to uninstall the package.

To verify the lockdown is successful, run the following command to check the status of the unit:

systemctl status smartmontools.service

The output will clearly indicate that the service is masked (symlinked to /dev/null) and the Active state will read inactive (dead). Your Ubuntu Server will no longer attempt to interrogate its virtual disks for hardware health metrics, optimizing log files and reducing background overhead in your virtualized environment.