No JSON support for "Auto Offline data collection on/off support"

[Alexander Shaduri]

Hi,

It looks like in JSON/ATA output, no corresponding keys are present for "Auto Offline data collection on/off support" / "No Auto Offline data collection support".

GSmartControl uses these to check if it's supported or not, so that it can enable the appropriate checkbox.

If this is something that is problematic and/or useless on modern drives, please let me know and I'll remove this functionality from GSmartControl.

Thanks!

[Christian Franke]

This capability check was inherited from smartmontools predecessor ​smartsuite and was originally named Automatic Timer ON/OFF support, see smartmontools 5.0​.

See also this related comment in atacmds.h:

// TODO: Remove uses of this check.  Bit 1 is vendor specific since ATA-4.
// Automatic timer support was only documented for very old IBM drives
// (for example IBM Travelstar 40GNX).

That's why I decided to omit an extra bool value in the JSON data. The underlying capability bitmask is available in the JSON values array. Index 0: Offline capabilities, index 1: SMART capabilities.

{
  "ata_smart_data": {
    "capabilities": {
      "values": [
        83,
        3
      ]
    }
  }
}

Simply check for (ata_smart_data.capabilities.values[0] & 0x02).

I don't know whether the smartctl -o command has any actual effect if used on modern drives.

It should not do any harm to keep the related GSmartControl checkbox as is.

[Christian Franke]

The related capability bit is available in the JSON output, see above comment.

[Alexander Shaduri]

Thank you Christian,

Since it looks like it's not widely used, I'm inclined towards its complete removal. It has not been functioning even on my own drives for a while now.