SMART on SATA drives

Randy Kelsoe randykel at swbell.net
Mon Jun 7 13:12:52 UTC 2004


Phil Anderson wrote:

>I have two computers (Dell PowerEdge 400SC, the other homemade) and both
>of them have an SATA drives.  Previously, the SATA drives were running
>in IDE emulation mode in the Bios, and SMART worked prefectly.  They are
>now both running in native SATA mode, and SMART has stopped working :( 
>The other IDE drive in the systems still reports info correctly with
>smartctl.
>
>Any ideas anyone?
>
>smartctl --info /dev/sda
>smartctl version 5.21 Copyright (C) 2002-3 Bruce Allen
>Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
> 
>Device:   Version:
>Serial number: 3JV3FHST
>Device type: disk
>Local Time is: Mon Jun  7 22:52:35 2004 EST
>Device does not support SMART
>
>
>Thanks,
>Phil
>
>
>  
>
 From the smartmon faq:  (http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/#FAQ)

"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."

While you are at the smartmon home page, download the latest version 
(5.31) and follow the instructions on how to get it installed with 
fedora core.





More information about the fedora-list mailing list