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.