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I have many servers in different data centers. Lately I had some disk failures that I probably could've detected beforehand, so I started automatically running smartctl -t periodically on each disk. I'm short testing disks twice a week and long testing them once a week. Will that put any kind of pressure on the disks and potentially shorter their age? What effects does smartctl have on disks?

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This Seems like a hardware question about S.M.A.R.T. tests, rather than an OS-specific question. smartctl is just one of the tools that can initiate the tests. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_S.M.A.R.T._tools has a long list (including whether they can initiate self-tests)... (For different oeprating systems as well) – Gert van den Berg Jan 24 at 12:29
Do you have RAID? – ewwhite Jan 24 at 16:19

migrated from unix.stackexchange.com Jan 24 at 16:15

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A long self test will try to read the entire disk (when the drive is otherwise idle).

I've never heard that disk accesses would affect the lifetime. For some reason, the head mechanics appear to be more reliable than any other part of the disk.

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