wiki:USB

Version 3 (modified by Christian Franke, 15 years ago) ( diff )

Add info about DEVICESCAN support

USB devices and smartmontools

To access USB storage devices, the operating system sends SCSI commands through the USB transport to the device. If the USB device is actually a PATA or SATA disk in an USB enclosure, the firmware of its USB bridge chip translates these commands into the corresponding ATA commands. This works straightforward for read and write commands, but not for SMART commands.

To access SMART functionality, smartmontools must be able to send ATA commands directly to the disk. For USB devices, at least the following conditions must be met:

  • The USB bridge provides an ATA pass-through command.
  • This command is supported by smartmontools.
  • The operating system provides a SCSI pass-through I/O-control which works through its USB-layer.
  • SCSI support is implemented in the operating system interface of smartmontools.

Some recent USB bridges already support the vendor independent SAT (SCSI/ATA Translation, ANSI INCITS 431-2007) standard. Other USB bridges provide vendor specific ATA pass-through commands. The current version of smartmontools supports the following pass-through commands and USB bridges:

Command USB bridges smartctl option 48-bit ATA support Comment
SAT ATA pass-through 12 and 16 various (Initio, Oxford, ...) -d sat[,16]; -d sat,12 requires '-d sat[,16]' Older Linux kernels may require '-d sat,12'
Cypress ATACB Cypress CY7C68300B/C (AT2LP), CY7C68310 (ISD-300LP) -d usbcypress[,CMD] No CY7C68300A (AT2) may not work.
JMicron ATA pass-through JMicron JM20329, JM20335-39 -d usbjmicron[,x][,PORT] No:JM20327, Yes:JM20336/9 '-d usbjmicron,x' enables 48-bit support
Sunplus ATA pass-through Sunplus SPIF215/6, SPIF225/6 -d usbsunplus Yes

Smartmontools was successfully tested with many USB devices on several Platforms. This will never work on MacOS X unless someone adds SCSI pass-through support to this OS. If the USB ID can be obtained from the operating system, smartmontools also supports auto-detection of (the already tested) USB devices. Then it is not necessary to specify the '-d' option. See the following table for details:

Platform ...has SCSI pass-through smartmontools supports SCSI ... supports USB ... auto-detection ... in smartd DEVICESCAN Comment
Linux Yes Yes YES YES YES See comment about SAT in above table
MacOS X No No No No No USB works with e.g. XP in a VM
FreeBSD Yes Yes YES YES YES
NetBSD Yes Yes YES No No
OpenBSD Yes Yes YES No No
Solaris Yes Yes YES No No
QNX ? No No No No
OS/2 ? No No No No
Windows NT/2K/XP/Vista Yes Yes YES YES No Auto-detection is slow due to the use of 'wmic.exe'
Windows 9x/ME Yes Yes YES No No Requires ASPI driver
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