Retrieving S.M.A.R.T. data from USB hard drives

[Franc Zabkar]

External USB HD enclosures have a USB-to-SATA/PATA IDE bridge chip
that passes ATA/ATAPI commands to the enclosed hard drive. In my case
the chip is a JMicron JM20337. Unfortunately there is no standard way
of passing SMART commands via USB. However, some chips have vendor
specific ATA pass-through commands and these are listed here:

http://smartmontools.wiki.sourceforge.net/overview_USB-Support
http://www.hdsentinel.com/usbharddisks.php

Compiled Windows versions of smartmontools are here:
http://smartmontools-win32.dyndns.org/smartmontools/

According to Christian Franke ...

"Access to USB devices requires OS support to send SCSI commands
through USB. The only SCSI pass through support available on 9x/ME is
the old ASPI layer. The pseudo-device names used by smartctl to access
ASPI are 'scsi[0-9][0-f]'".

Eventually I found that the following command worked, but only after
editing the registry:

smartctl -a -d usbjmicron scsi10

I couldn't use scsi00 or scsi01 as these were assigned to my two
optical drives (DVD-ROM and DVD writer).

Instead I modified the following registry key by changing SCSILUN from
0 to 1. For some reason Win98 chose a non-unique SCSILUN and
SCSITargetID (0,0) for my external USB drive. This registry
modification did not persist after disconnecting and reconnecting the
USB HDD -- the original 0,0 values returned. BTW I don't have any real
SCSI devices or adapters.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\SCSI\ST332062________5QF53Q22E\USBSTOR&JMDISK&0000USB&VID_152D&PID_2338&222251F5312200]
"Capabilities"=hex:14,00,00,00
"SCSITargetID"="0"
"SCSILUN"="1"
"RevisionLevel"="E "
"ProductId"=" 5QF53Q22"
"Manufacturer"="ST332062"
"DeviceType"=hex:00
"Int13"=hex:01
"PModeInt13"=hex:01
"CurrentDriveLetterAssignment"="HI"
"HardwareID"="ST332062________5QF53Q22E,GenDisk,SCSI\\ST332062________5QF53Q22E"
"Class"="DiskDrive"
"ClassGUID"="{4d36e967-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}"
"Driver"="DiskDrive\\0017"
"Mfg"="(Standard disk drives)"
"DeviceDesc"="ST332062 5QF53Q22"
"ConfigFlags"=hex:00,00,00,00

Here are the relevant data for my Athlon XP machine using a JMicron
driver under Windows 98SE:

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/Smartctl/reg_usbstor.txt
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/Smartctl/reg_usb.txt
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/Smartctl/reg_scsi.txt
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/Smartctl/reg_mod.txt
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/Smartctl/jmicron.log

This is the debug log file for my AMD K6-2 Win98SE box using a generic
Microsoft NUSB mass storage driver:

smartctl -a -r ioctl,2 -d usbjmicron scsi10

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/Smartctl/320GB_all.log

BTW, HD Sentinel 2.81 Standard version does not see my external
physical USB HD, even after the registry hack. It does see the logical
volumes, though.

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.