allow for shorter check intervals (and perhaps use them per default)

[calestyo]

Hi.

The minimum check interval for smartd seems to be 10 minutes and the default seems to be 30 minutes.

Is there any reason for that limitation (like more often checks having influence on the drive health)?

If not than I think allowing smaller minimums (perhaps 60 or 120s?) and a smaller default (5-10 mins?) would have several benefits:

1) Removable devices, are often only attached for short times,... so with the default of 30 mins, they may not get checked at all for a long time.
(Though the proper solution for this is actually #1016).

2) I've seen drives starting to die pretty sudden without showing any big and steady degradation of SMART values before... but rather a very abrupt one.
So for such cases it may be helpful, to check the drives more often, in order to notice this.

3) Making smartd usable as a hddtemp replacement (see #1017).
Temperatures can increase quite fast,... to make smartd usable as a temperature monitor, it would be nice if much smaller check intervals were possible.

Cheers,
Chris.

[Christian Franke]

The minimum check interval is 10 seconds (´-i 10´). See smartd man page.

Changing the ~15 year old default of ´-i 1800´ without an very important reason is a bad idea. Many packages rely on this default.