Andrei Popescu wrote:
On Sat,11.Oct.08, 05:59:18, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:Andrei Popescu wrote:On Fri,10.Oct.08, 21:19:13, Michal R. Hoffmann wrote:S.M.A.R.T. doesn't work on my external drive. Try the docs from smartmontools, they have some information about this.Hi,I have a WD external USB harddrive which I use for backups. How can I check the drive? Is it possible to use S.M.A.R.T (is it supported on USB drives)? As it is my backup drive I'd prefer to know if something's going wrong.The drive is encrypted with luks, automounted by hal. I use Debian sid, Gnome.Is it a SATA drive?It's connected to the computer via USB, same as OP's. I don't know how I could tell what it uses internally, but I doubt it matters because AFAICT it's a limitation of the USB interface.
Well, I bought 2 of those Venus enclosure boxes. Let's see: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817145657One for a ATA hdd and one for a SATA hdd. Then I bought an oem ATA and a SATA disk: an ST380211 and an wd80_0jd-60 and put them inside the enclosures and connected them.
They work fine, show up as sda and sdb. But *with the Debian kernel* I can do: smartctl -d sat /dev/sda --all -T permissiveand get an answer. But when I try that with sdb, I get the answer that the disk is not smart enabled.
Now, when I roll my own kernel (which does not have near the same .config as the Debian one) I get that neither disk is smart enabled.
So bottomline seems to be that smartctl *is* dependent in the kernel config *and* what sort of drive is involved and how.
Hugo