ActiveSmart and Encoding

[Benihana]

I have recently installed ActiveSmart (hdd S.M.A.R.T. monitoring tool) on my machine, as my harddisks are frequently streaming data for hours on end. I do quite a bit of video work on my computer, and while my computer is encoding I don't access the drives being used to ensure maximum quality.

ActiveSmart actively queries the drives every 30 minutes to get updated S.M.A.R.T. status information. Should this cause any concern to my video? I usually encode with XviD, and I worry that having ActiveSmart query my drives while they are being heavily used, that it could possibly introduce an artifact or glitch into the stream.

Does anybody have any experience with encoding and ActiveSmart? Thanks.

[Shinigami-Sama]

SMART Data is usually generated on the fly by your drive's controller and stored in a PROM, so it shouldn't give you any trouble with videos

and no it wouldn't cause an artifact
it'd cause a slow down on encoding/playback, but chances are you'd never even notice it

[Benihana]

The most my CPU ever goes is like 3% when ActiveSmart queries the drives, so it doesn't really slow down the encoding/playback at all. I was just concerned with it using the same bus to access the SMART data and to encode video. I didn't know if it halted the stream just for the SMART data to be transferred, in which case I would wonder if it affected my video encoding.