The Planet Forums > Hard Drives reporting: Device does not support SMART

Full Version: Hard Drives reporting: Device does not support SMART

The Planet Forums > System Administration > Server Hardware

thedanno

Aug 18 2005, 10:38 PM

I'm having this problem on both of my servermatrix servers. When I attempt to run smartctl -a /dev/sda I get the following:

CODE

smartctl version 5.1-11 Copyright (C) 2002-3 Bruce Allen

Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Device: ATA ST380013AS Version: 3.18

Serial number: 5JV6GXMS

Device type: disk

Local Time is: Thu Aug 18 23:29:08 2005 CDT

Device does not support SMART [bad value in scsi command]

SMART Sense: Ok!

No Error counter log to report

Warning: device does not support Self Test Logging

(except the other server reports the following device info: WDC WD800JD-00HK Version: 13.0)

Any ideas??? I was under the impression that ALL current hard drives supported S.M.A.R.T. ?? Both systems are running RHEL 3. One is a celeron 1.7, the other is a p4 2.8.

Thanks!!

Hogie

Aug 18 2005, 10:56 PM

What if SMART is diabled in the Bios? What would it return then? I know you can turn it off...

eddy2099

Aug 18 2005, 11:23 PM

That Harddisk model does have SMART support.

Hogie

Aug 18 2005, 11:26 PM

QUOTE (eddy2099)

That Harddisk model does have SMART support.

Right, but in the BIOS of your computer, you can disable SMART support on IDE channels...

eddy2099

Aug 19 2005, 01:03 AM

Yup, wouldn't disagree with that

thedanno

Aug 19 2005, 06:18 AM

Only way for the BIOS setting to be checked/changed would be for me to put in a support ticket correct? I don't think I can make the change on my end.

dball

Aug 22 2005, 09:32 AM

QUOTE (eddy2099)

That Harddisk model does have SMART support.

Eddy, you'd probably know this. Is there a program to read hard disk smart data on WinXP?

Thanks,

-- David

eddy2099

Aug 22 2005, 11:19 AM

QUOTE (dball)

Eddy, you'd probably know this. Is there a program to read hard disk smart data on WinXP?

Try Active SMART http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/index.html

Ronny AcuNett

Feb 23 2006, 10:44 PM

Not all current hard drives support SMART. SMART was designed for IDE drives.

nForcer

Feb 23 2006, 11:44 PM

Last post was made by Eddy2099 on Mon Aug 22, 2005 11:19 am...

Wow dude, talk about digging up an old thread.

.....why?

Blue|Fusion

Feb 24 2006, 09:22 PM

Yeah...looks like ya rose from the ashes Ronny.

But to correct you a bit, 99.9% of HDDs will have S.M.A.R.T. capabilities. Smart was originally created for ATA drives....not specifically IDE (although that was the norm at the time). SATA has SMART because it's still ATA. SCSI still has SMART, although it's different from the SMART developed by Compaq for ATA disks.

gbock

Feb 25 2006, 03:57 AM

I'll chime in on this one too. From the smartmontools home page:

QUOTE

FireWire, USB, and SATA disks/systems

As for USB and FireWire (ieee1394) disks and tape drives, the news is not good. They appear to Linux as SCSI devices but their implementations do not usually support those SCSI commands needed by smartmontools. The ieee1394 consortium recently certified the first external enclosure (containing a ATA disk and a protocol bridge) as being compliant to the relevant standards. Such devices have already been on the market for about 3 years and they tend to only support the bare minimum of commands needed for device operation (i.e. SMART support is an unsupported extra).

Smartmontools should work correctly with SATA drives under both Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, if you use the standard IDE drivers in drivers/ide. If you use the new libata drivers, it won't work correctly because libata doesn't yet support the needed ATA-passthrough ioctl() calls. Jeff Garzik, the libata developer, says that this support will be added to libata in the future. When this happens, we'll add support to smartmontools for a new SATA/libata device type '-d sata'. Typically, to force an SATA disk to run using the standard (non-libata) drivers, you must use the BIOS to select "legacy mode" for the controller. If the IDE driver doesn't support your particular SATA controller, or the controller doesn't have a legacy interface, then only libata can be used. Unless the hard disk controller on the system motherboard is Intel, VIA or nVidia, standard IDE drivers may not work

Note: an unofficial patch to libata that allows smartmontools to be used with the standard '-d ata' device type was posted to the linux kernel mailing list at the end of August 2004. The patch is included in the libata-dev patchset that can be applied to a recent Linux kernel (>= 2.6.9). With a SATA disk driven by a libata driver, smartmontools can now be used by specifying both the device type 'ata' and the SCSI device corresponding to this disk, for example, smartctl -i -d ata /dev/sda. The patch is still under development and it is probably best to make sure that the disk is idle before trying smartmontools.

defZA

Nov 23 2007, 07:35 AM

This SMART error is fixed in the newer versions of smartctl / smartd.
So just update the software.

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