Should the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring not be activated from system start?

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

Due to a SMART error message when plugging in an USB stick, I asked myself whether a service is running in the background that monitors the SMART status of all drives. In KDE I can ask the SMART status via menu, but I assume, that the status is called only for this moment or when plugin a stick.
The smartd service wasn’t running, so i started it:

[frank@EOS ~]$ systemctl status smartd
○ smartd.service - Self Monitoring and Reporting Technology (SMART) Daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/smartd.service; disabled; preset: disabled)
     Active: inactive (dead)
       Docs: man:smartd(8)
             man:smartd.conf(5)

[frank@EOS ~]$ sudo systemctl start smartd

[frank@EOS ~]$ systemctl status smartd
● smartd.service - Self Monitoring and Reporting Technology (SMART) Daemon
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/smartd.service; disabled; preset: disabled)
     Active: active (running) since Thu 2025-05-22 13:39:58 CEST; 5s ago
 Invocation: 29e4cbe57f3344939450585ae719a5df
       Docs: man:smartd(8)
             man:smartd.conf(5)
   Main PID: 3577 (smartd)
     Status: "Next check of 3 devices will start at 14:09:58"
      Tasks: 1 (limit: 37232)
     Memory: 2M (peak: 2.5M)
        CPU: 12ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/smartd.service
             └─3577 /usr/bin/smartd -n

Do you have any idea why this service is not running by default? I think it is very important and useful to know if my ssds are dying. Is there anything against running this service from system start? Does it perhaps abrade the ssds?
Or does KDE possibly do this independently from smartd?

2

I don’t think there is tremendous harm in it. That being said, I don’t think it is all that useful for most people. It writes smart status to the logs on a frequent basis.

3

Some information on the Crucial site would show you that smart is less useful for SSD’s then for harddrives.