David Fox wrote: <snip>
Hmm perhaps this is true, since I don't have any USB hard drive media, but I would think they fall into two distinct types: * flash (RAM) drives * enclosures that are basically a standard sata or ide drive with a power and usb cable added For #2 I'm not sure why you couldn't treat it more like a regular HD except for the USB part gets in the way (it's slower in terms of file I/O through a USB bus instead of a more standard ide or SATA connection. But why wouldn't things like smartmontools work through the USB?
I've posted this before, but I have 2 USB HDD enclosures. I bought the enclosures and the HDD's separately and put them together myself. 1 with a SATA disk and 1 with an IDE disk. The latter I can get results with:
smartctl -t long -d sat /dev/sda -T permissive smartctl -d sat /dev/sda --all -T permissiveThe former gives me an error when I do that. Funny thing is that I can only get good results with Debian's (Sid) kernel:
hugo@debian:/$ uname -a Linux debian 2.6.26-1-686 #1 SMP Sat Jan 10 18:29:31 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux*not* with my own kernel of the same version. Never found an explanation of that either.
Hugo