Re: How to check USB harddrive?
On Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:19:13 +0100
"Michal R. Hoffmann" <misiek_spam@o2.pl> wrote:
> 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.
USB drives generally don't support SMART. From the smartmontools faq
[0]:
Smartmontools for FireWire, USB, and SATA disks/systems
As for USB and FireWire (IEEE 1394) disks and tape drives, the news is
not good. They appear to the operating system as SCSI devices but their
implementations do not usually support those SCSI commands needed by
smartmontools. A consortium associated with IEEE 1394 certified some
external enclosures (containing a ATA disk and a protocol bridge) as
being compliant to the relevant standards. Even still, that compliance
means that they tend to only support the bare minimum of commands
needed for device operation (i.e. SMART support is an unsupported
extra). Hopefully external USB and Firewire devices will support SAT in
the future, see below. Some USB device based on cypress chips support a
proprietary protocol (ATACB) that allow to send raw ATA commands (i.e.
SMART support).
*****
Continue reading that page for more information.
[0] http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/faq.html#testinghelp
> Michal R. Hoffmann
Celejar
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