smartmontools for external USB drive docks

I recently purchased a USB 3 drive dock (Orico 6619) because my current drive dock (MyGica… no model number) doesn’t support SMART info with smartctl command.


jason@j2c ~ $ sudo smartctl /dev/sdb -a
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-3.11.0-12-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

Read Device Identity failed: scsi error unsupported scsi opcode

A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.

And then found out the vendor id:product id was in the smartmontools bad list. So when I got my new USB 3 enclosure (impulse buy, I did no research) I was sadden by this


jason@j2c ~ $ sudo smartctl /dev/sdb -a
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-3.11.0-12-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

/dev/sdb: Unknown USB bridge [0x2537:0x1066 (0x100)]
Please specify device type with the -d option.

Use smartctl -h to get a usage summary

I was bummed. After reading smartmontools mailing list archive, most new USB3 devices worked with the -d sat option.


sudo smartctl /dev/sdb -a -d sat
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-3.11.0-12-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Seagate Momentus 7200.4
Device Model: ST9320423AS
....

Sucsess! My new drive dock does work with SMART read outs! Back to saving peoples data off old hard drives.

2 Comments

  1. Bryce says:

    extremely helpful! thanks

  2. Ricardo T says:

    Thanks.
    This just saved me a lot of time!
    The Orico enclosure is really cool now that it is supported in smartmontools.

    Cheers.

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