FreeNAS smartd service refuses to start

Logged into my FreeNAS-11.1-U5 console after updating it and had a system alert that smartd was unable to start.

The GUI log was complaining as well:

Don't recall which disks these were, so I went over to Storage | View Disks in the GUI and they were the USB sticks used for the mirrored boot. I knew this as I labeled each drives slot in the server.

Since the event log was mentioning removable this was another clue. S.M.A.R.T. really is not designed for USB flash drives and more for hard drives and solid-state drives. Click Edit on each of these and turn off S.M.A.R.T.:

I did not try it but you could pass '-d removable' for S.M.A.R.T. extra options based on the syslog complaining about that switch. This all generates a fresh smartctl.conf located in /usr/local/etc. Once completed, just head back over to services and smartd is running happily. If not just start it and you should be good.

-Kevin