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Follow up to my other question.

I started using hotplug to insert my backup SATA HDD which is fully SMART capable.

One odd thing I noticed, is that when the drive is hot plugged, it is shown as a removable drive (iI guess it have to offer a way to park those headers before removal).

But one side effect, is that most utilities will show it as a USB drive, and I do not have access to SMART features.

Here is screenshot of KDE disks utility showing the SATA HDD as a USB driver, and SMART option disabled:

Screenshot.

Is there any way to have it all? Hot plug and eject button, plus access to SMART data?

Giacomo1968
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gcb
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    `smartctl ` sees the the smart data just fine, but i am afraid of what else is not monitoring driver failures if most utilities ignore it. – gcb Dec 29 '20 at 03:38
  • added an issue on the application in question https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-disk-utility/-/issues/194 – gcb Dec 29 '20 at 03:38

1 Answers1

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Use the smartctl command from the smartmontools. In case of failure either determine the type of usb bridge and set the -d parameter accordingly or start trying out the parameter like -d sat,12 -d sat,16

Added 1.1.2020 9:59 (UTC+1): Response to comment

If your software does not provide you with configuration parameters such as -d as smartmontools does, hardware changes might do the trick.

If you add a eSATA PCIe card to your machine and put your drive into an external eSATA housing your SMART parameters should be available (based on my experience).

Be careful, if you already bought your drive in an external housing there might be additional translating interface electronics like stuff that translate 512e sectors back to 4096 byte sectors with would make your partition disappear when connecting that way. You would need to copy that (source) drive file-wise to another target drive, then remove the source drive from its housing, repartition the source, format it and the copy the files back to the source now externally connect over eSATA.

As for your doubts, SMART is about reading data from the drive not writing. If smartctl uses different commands to access them your drive will not break.

When in doubt, look up the hardware ID number of your USB device to find out. Unfortunately I only know how to do that under some Windows operating systems.

r2d3
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  • `smartctl` can see the data. But some utilities, like gnome-disks, do not! How can I check any failure WILL be noticed in time by other components? I do not want to manually check things every hour, I want to receive an email if the hot-pluggable drive fails, just like I get for the non-hot-plug ones. And I do not want to force my drive to fail to test it out :) – gcb Jan 01 '21 at 01:39
  • gnome-disks uses libatasmart, which unfortunately hasn't had any developer looking at it for the last decade. (It is supposed to auto-detect ATA passthrough ability in those USB SATA adapters, but for some reason it just doesn't work with all of them). – u1686_grawity Jan 01 '21 at 09:31