no SMART support for western digital drive

[kamaraju kusumanchi]

Running gsmartcontrol on a brand new Western Digital hard drive says
that SMART support is unavailable. I was under the impression that
most hard drives have SMART support these days. Given that Western
Digital is a popular company I am a bit shocked that they are
manufacturing hard drives without SMART support.

Does anyone know of a work around to check the health of this drive?

Hard disk Info:
"WD Blue 1TB Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 64MB Cache
3.5 Inch - WD10EZEX" bought from Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Desktop-Hard-Disk-Drive/dp/B0088PUEPK.


gsmartcontrol output:

smartctl 6.4 2014-10-07 r4002 [x86_64-linux-3.16.0-4-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor: WDC WD10
Product: EZEX-00BN5A0
Revision: 0106
Compliance: SPC-4
User Capacity: 1,000,204,886,016 bytes [1.00 TB]
Logical block size: 512 bytes
LB provisioning type: unreported, LBPME=-1, LBPRZ=0
Form Factor: 3.5 inches
Logical Unit id: 0x50323039383638bd
Serial number: DB98765432117
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Sun Nov 15 23:17:54 2015 EST
SMART support is: Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===

Error Counter logging not supported

Device does not support Self Test logging

--
Kamaraju S Kusumanchi | http://raju.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Blog

[David Christensen]

On 11/15/2015 08:32 PM, kamaraju kusumanchi wrote:
> Does anyone know of a work around to check the health of this drive?

Check your CMOS setup for a SMART enable/ disable setting.


David

[Andrew McGlashan]

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On 16/11/2015 3:32 PM, kamaraju kusumanchi wrote:
> Running gsmartcontrol on a brand new Western Digital hard drive
> says that SMART support is unavailable. I was under the impression
> that most hard drives have SMART support these days. Given that
> Western Digital is a popular company I am a bit shocked that they
> are manufacturing hard drives without SMART support.
>
> Does anyone know of a work around to check the health of this
> drive?

It's likely that the drive isn't directly connected to the SATA bus;
if it is going through a "bridge" device, be that a USB, Firewire or
something else... then there is every chance that your are being
denied access as it isn't passing through.

Kind Regards
AndrewM
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[kamaraju kusumanchi]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 12:01 AM, Andrew McGlashan
<andrew.m...@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA256
>
> On 16/11/2015 3:32 PM, kamaraju kusumanchi wrote:
>> Running gsmartcontrol on a brand new Western Digital hard drive
>> says that SMART support is unavailable. I was under the impression
>> that most hard drives have SMART support these days. Given that
>> Western Digital is a popular company I am a bit shocked that they
>> are manufacturing hard drives without SMART support.
>>
>> Does anyone know of a work around to check the health of this
>> drive?
>
> It's likely that the drive isn't directly connected to the SATA bus;
> if it is going through a "bridge" device, be that a USB, Firewire or
> something else... then there is every chance that your are being
> denied access as it isn't passing through.
>
> Kind Regards
> AndrewM

The hard drive is placed in a Dual Bay external hard drive docking
station which is connected via USB to my computer. Is that a problem?

Docking station info:
Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station
for 2.5 or 3.5in HDD, SSD with Hard Drive Duplicator/Cloner Function
[4TB Support] (EC-HDD2)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IKC14OG

Is my only option to connect this hard drive internally? How does one
check the health of a drive connected via USB?

thanks

[kamaraju kusumanchi]

I do not think it is a problem with CMOS setup since SMART is working
fine on my internal hard drive. But I can check for it next time when
I reboot the computer.

thanks

[David Christensen]

On 11/15/2015 09:10 PM, kamaraju kusumanchi wrote:
> I do not think it is a problem with CMOS setup since SMART is working
> fine on my internal hard drive. But I can check for it next time when
> I reboot the computer.

So, the drive is not internal? How is it connected to your computer?


David

[Dominique Dumont]

On Monday 16 November 2015 00:17:20 kamaraju kusumanchi wrote:
> The hard drive is placed in a Dual Bay external hard drive docking
> station which is connected via USB to my computer. Is that a problem?

Probably.

smartctl man page gives some hint. See --device option

Use lsusb (may be with -v option) to find the type of usb bridge you have.

HTH

--
https://github.com/dod38fr/ -o- http://search.cpan.org/~ddumont/
http://ddumont.wordpress.com/ -o- irc: dod at irc.debian.org

[Jonathan Dowland]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 12:17:20AM -0500, kamaraju kusumanchi wrote:
> The hard drive is placed in a Dual Bay external hard drive docking
> station which is connected via USB to my computer. Is that a problem?

Yes.

> Is my only option to connect this hard drive internally? How does one
> check the health of a drive connected via USB?

Some USB<->SATA bridge devices support SMART, but many do not. smartctl
knows how to query SMART parameters for some USB bridges:

https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/Supported_USB-Devices

In your case, either the bridge doesn't support it, or smartctl does not
know how to query SMART via that particular bridge (but could perhaps be
taught how to by a suitably talented programmer).

[kamaraju kusumanchi]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 6:11 AM, Christoph Anton Mitterer
<cale...@scientia.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 2015-11-16 at 09:34 +0000, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
>> https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/Supported_USB-Devices
> But note that Debian's smartmontools are pretty outdated and many USB
> bridges supported already in the newest version won't work in Debian.
>
> Cheers,
> Chris.

Thanks for pointing this out. I wonder why a new version is not
compiled even though a bug report
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=789721 was filed
almost 5 months ago. May be this package is not being actively
maintained?

raju

[kamaraju kusumanchi]

Thanks for all the replies. My USB device is not listed in the above
wiki page table or in http://www.linux-usb.org/usb.ids . I posted a
message to smartmontools-database mailing list
http://sourceforge.net/p/smartmontools/mailman/message/34625159/ for
futher guidance.

USB device info:
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 152d:1561 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron
USA Technology Corp.

In the wiki page, I see that some users had success by using '-d
usbjmicron', '-d usbjmicron[,x]', '-d usbjmicron,x' etc., I want to
try these options one by one and see which one works. Will the drive
get corrupted if I tried the wrong -d option? Any suggestions on which
one I should try first?

thanks
raju

[Jonathan Dowland]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 12:36:53AM -0500, kamaraju kusumanchi wrote:
> Thanks for pointing this out. I wonder why a new version is not
> compiled even though a bug report
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=789721 was filed
> almost 5 months ago. May be this package is not being actively
> maintained?

It would appear it is not receiving enough attention. However, it is
in the collab-maint repository, so in theory any DD could work on it.
Since I use and rely on smartmontools myself, I'm adding this to my
TODO list.

[Jonathan Dowland]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 11:45:31AM +0000, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> It would appear it is not receiving enough attention. However, it is
> in the collab-maint repository, so in theory any DD could work on it.
> Since I use and rely on smartmontools myself, I'm adding this to my
> TODO list.

Just to report, I've actually done this. I've uploaded a package of the
new upstream version today; but I uploaded it to the 'DELAYED-7' queue
to give the maintainer an opportunity to block the upload if they aren't
happy with it. In the meantime, a copy of the package is available at
http://jmtd.net/tmp/smartmontools/