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Thursday, May 7. 2009

USB hard drives with SMART

A common way to check the health state of a hard disk is SMART. It gives various informations about occuring errors. In Linux, there's the smartmontools package containing tools to read SMART data of hard drives (smartctl -a /dev/[hddevice] gives you a bunch of information).

I found it always frustrating that SMART didn't work with USB drives. It's a standard bound to IDE/ATA. Although common USB-drives are internally IDE/SATA, sending the SMART commands to the drive requires proprietary extensions. But now, the smartmontools-developers have included support for some USB drives. It worked with the USB HDs I had available for testing.

There's no release yet containing the USB-support. If you're on Gentoo, you can fetch a live-CVS ebuild here.
Posted by Hanno Böck in English, Gentoo, Linux at 21:08 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)
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This blog is written by Hanno Böck. Unless noted otherwise, its content is licensed as CC0.

You can find my web page with links to my work as a journalist here.

I am also publishing a newsletter about climate change and decarbonization technologies.

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