Re: About USB hard drives and errors

[Celejar <celejar@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 10 Apr 2010 22:06:06 -0600
Paul E Condon <pecondon@mesanetworks.net> wrote:

...

> I got a little less timid and tried running smartctl even though I was
> quite unsure of what to expect. It ran. Each of the three USB HD gave
> somewhat different output, but none gave output that claimed there was
> a working SMART on the drive. These drives are Western Digital (WD).
> The WD web site mentions SMART and also uses the words Smart Drive to 
> mean something else that is a proprietary marketing thing, AFAICT. I
> was unable to find a list of part #s for drives that support S.M.A.R.T.
> 
> I think I should be in the market for a better class of drives, but not
> this weekend. Thanks for the help.

My understanding is that S.M.A.R.T. doesn't generally work over USB.
As Wikipedia puts it:

For example, few external drives connected via USB and Firewire
correctly send S.M.A.R.T. data over those interfaces.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Standards_and_implementation

Celejar
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