Is it ok to monitor SSD with HWINFO all day?

[k371]

I use HWINFO + RTSS to monitor and display GPU/CPU temps etc when playing games so they would be in the background all day. I also want to monitor "Total Host Writes" for my SSD because it's already at 46% health/27TB writes after just 2 years of usage and I wanna know which of my activity does the most writes to my SSD. So is it ok to have the HWINFO sensors for my SSD on all day everyday? Or would it be harmful to the SSD?

This is the information shown when hovering the cursor on the SSD/HDD section of the sensors

https://imgur.com/xT21Vlw

I guess it's a bad idea then?

 

[Martin]

Yes, it's OK. Monitoring SMART statistics is safe and should not perform any harmful or excessive operations. Also with the default SMART polling period of 100 cycles (and 2 seconds global) this means SMART data is read only every 2*100 = 3.3 minutes.

 

[k371]

Yes, it's OK. Monitoring SMART statistics is safe and should not perform any harmful or excessive operations. Also with the default SMART polling period of 100 cycles (and 2 seconds global) this means SMART data is read only every 2*100 = 3.3 minutes.

I've set the global polling rate to 3 secs and the cycles to 200..

Btw..when I turn off monitoring for anything HDD/SSD related and the light of my external HDD still blinks, usually it's turned off automatically when I don't access it for 15 minutes. Then when I close HWINFO, 15 minutes later my ext HDD turns off. Does it mean clicking "disable monitoring" only stops showing the data but it still monitors it?

 

[Martin]

It should disable monitoring too, but you should disable also the sensor heading if you want to completely disable it.

 

[hwmeat]

Is it OK to set HWinfo to read S.M.A.R.T data every cycle (2 seconds)?
I want to know my Nvme drives’ temperatures constantly.

Also these temperatures are under the disk S.M.A.R.T group, but as I read from Wikipedia, they are not S.M.A.R.T values, it is possible to monitor these with S.M.A.R.T disabled in the Main Settings? Currently if I disable S.M.A.R.T monitoring in the Main Settings, these temperatures disappear together with other S.M.A.R.T values.

 

[Martin]

Yes, it's safe to monitor those temperature frequently.
You're right, S.M.A.R.T. is for SATA drives and NVMe doesn't use this feature set/terminology. But since the S.M.A.R.T. term became so widely used, we keep calling the NVMe health stats as SMART even though it's not the same.

 

[hwmeat]

Is there a way to have disk drive temperatures enabled while S.M.A.R.T is disabled?

With S.M.A.R.T monitoring enabled, one of my hard drive never stops spinning (WD Ultrastar HC550)

 

[Martin]

Sorry, this is currently not possible. All disk temperature monitoring currently relies on S.M.A.R.T. support.
I'm considering decoupling the S.M.A.R.T. polling period setting so that it won't apply to NVMe, only SATA.