smartd duplicating devices with trailing commas (e.g., /dev/sda and /dev/sda,) despite manual config

dastrix80

New Member
Oct 25, 2025
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System Environment:

OS: Proxmox VE 9.1.2

Hardware: Mix of SATA (Intel/WD) and SAS drives.

I am trying to configure smartd to monitor exactly 16 physical drives using /etc/smartd.conf. However, smartd consistently reports 29 or 30 devices. When running smartd -q showtests, the output shows every physical device twice: once with a clean path and once with a trailing comma.

Example Output:

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-INTEL_SSDSC2KB480G8_BTYF83150H7H480BGN
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-INTEL_SSDSC2KB480G8_BTYF83150H7H480BGN,

What I have already tried:

Manual Configuration: Listed all 16 drives explicitly using /dev/disk/by-id/ paths.

DEVICESCAN: Removed all instances of DEVICESCAN from the config file.

Environment Flags: Set smartd_opts="-q nodev0" in /etc/default/smartmontools to prevent auto-scanning.

Cache Clearing: Stopped the service, ran killall -9 smartd, and cleared /var/lib/smartmontools/* before restarting.

Sanitizing the File: Used sed to strip carriage returns (\r) and commas, and even used printf to rebuild the file from scratch to avoid hidden characters/encoding issues from the terminal.

Simplicity Test: Even with only 2 drives listed in smartd.conf, the daemon still reports 4 devices (the 2 drives + 2 "comma" versions).

Even with a perfectly clean, manual configuration file, smartd appears to be misparsing the end of each line as a comma or failing to ignore a "ghost" device list from another source. It seems to be appending a comma to every valid device path and attempting to monitor it as a second, unique (but non-existent) device.

Has anyone seen smartd inject commas into device paths on Proxmox? Is there a secondary configuration or a systemd override that might be forcing a "Configuration Merge" or causing this parsing error?
 
Thanks, yes Im running this:

Code:
root@Proxmox:~# smartd -V
smartd 7.4 2024-10-15 r5620 [x86_64-linux-6.17.2-1-pve] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

smartd comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free
software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License; either
version 2, or (at your option) any later version.
See https://www.gnu.org for further details.

smartmontools release 7.4 dated 2023-08-01 at 10:59:45 UTC
smartmontools SVN rev 5620 dated 2024-10-15 at 10:25:54
smartmontools build host: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
smartmontools build with: C++11, GCC 14.2.0
smartmontools configure arguments: [hidden in reproducible builds]
reproducible build SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH: 1750104607 (2025-06-17 06:10:07)
root@Proxmox:~#