SMART monitoring software for firewire drive?

[Will Dormann]

I have a hard drive in a Firewire/USB2 enclosure, and I heard it "thunk"
a couple of times recently.

Are there any applications to read SMART data over a firewire
connection? Or am I stuck removing the drive and connecting it to my
IDE controller to check.

Thanks
-WD

 

[Arno Wagner]

I have a hard drive in a Firewire/USB2 enclosure, and I heard it "thunk"
a couple of times recently.

Are there any applications to read SMART data over a firewire
connection? Or am I stuck removing the drive and connecting it to my
IDE controller to check.

Most likely. As far as I know Firewire HDDs use the SCSI command set,
just like USB ones do. There is no provision for SMART in SCSI.

Arno

 

[David A.Lethe]

Most likely. As far as I know Firewire HDDs use the SCSI command set,
just like USB ones do. There is no provision for SMART in SCSI.

Arno

SCSI drives most certainly support SMART. It is part of the ANSI
specification, and you can't even find a SCSI drive manufactured in
the last 5 years or so that doesn't support SMART.

As for SMART on firewire .. the problem is that most of the firewire
drives out there are IDE disks, that use a dongle chip that does the
protocol conversion. Most of these chips are pretty dumb, and they
chose not to implement the emulation beyond the bare-bones instruction
set required by the O/S. I.e, they didn't implement the SMART, which
is a huge amount of work as it is not a simple command translation.
David

 

[Arno Wagner]

Most likely. As far as I know Firewire HDDs use the SCSI command set,
just like USB ones do. There is no provision for SMART in SCSI.

Arno

SCSI drives most certainly support SMART. It is part of the ANSI
specification, and you can't even find a SCSI drive manufactured in
the last 5 years or so that doesn't support SMART.[/QUOTE]

Sorry, I should have said IDE-SMART. That is what I meant.

As for SMART on firewire .. the problem is that most of the firewire
drives out there are IDE disks, that use a dongle chip that does the
protocol conversion. Most of these chips are pretty dumb, and they
chose not to implement the emulation beyond the bare-bones instruction
set required by the O/S.

Right. They do only implement the minimum conversion for SCSI-Storage,
which does not include the SMART commands.

I.e, they didn't implement the SMART, which
is a huge amount of work as it is not a simple command translation.

.... and the SMART commands for SCSI(=firewire) are different than
those for IDE, hence the need for a translation in the first place.

Arno

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

SCSI drives most certainly support SMART.

Nope, they don't, they have PFA and are S.M.A.R.T. 'compliant'.

It is part of the ANSI specification, and you can't even find a SCSI
drive manufactured in the last 5 years or so that doesn't support SMART.

And even not S.M.A.R.T. compliant drives did have but PFA but only
lacked the setup page that would have made them S.M.A.R.T. compliant.

 

[PsychicStickleBrick]

I've had a Maxtor 5000DV 160GB USB/FireWire drive fail me yesterday. (I
mention the model as it seems to be one to avoid!)
As this is the fourth drive to fail me in two years (for personal use) I did a
little googling. It seems there are many utilities to monitor the SMART status
of drives:

From a search for "diagnostic tool USB hard drive" I found ActiveSMART -
http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/
Although I can't find any documentation that says it supports usb or firewire
drives. I have not had time to try it yet.

Interestingly, although Maxtor does not provide diagnostic software for their
external drives, their tech support suggested using Western Digital's Data
Lifegueard tools. It would seem that DataLifeGuard can check the SMART status
of an external drive (over USB at least) including non-Western Digital drives.
However in my case the drive was unresponsive and I could not get a final
status result.

PSB

 

[PsychicStickleBrick]

I've had a Maxtor 5000DV 160GB USB/FireWire drive fail me yesterday. (I
mention the model as it seems to be one to avoid!)
As this is the fourth drive to fail me in two years (for personal use) I did a
little googling. It seems there are many utilities to monitor the SMART status
of drives:

From a search for "diagnostic tool USB hard drive" I found ActiveSMART -
http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/
Although I can't find any documentation that says it supports usb or firewire
drives. I have not had time to try it yet.

Interestingly, although Maxtor does not provide diagnostic software for their
external drives, their tech support suggested using Western Digital's Data
Lifegueard tools. It would seem that DataLifeGuard can check the SMART status
of an external drive (over USB at least) including non-Western Digital drives.
However in my case the drive was unresponsive and I could not get a final
status result.

PSB

From the horses mouth....
---
Hello,

No, current version of Active SAMRT does not support drives on external USB
or Firewire cards. We plan to add this feature in the next version of the
program.

Feel free to email me if you have further questions.

Regards,
Dmitry Vergel

Ariolic Software
http://www.ariolic.com
----