[Beowulf] Re: failure trends in a large disk drive population

[Chris Samuel]

On Thu, 1 Mar 2007, Douglas Gilbert wrote:

> That FAQ entry is about 2 years out of date. smartmontools
> support for SATA disks behind a SCSI to ATA Translation (SAT)
> layer is now much better. Please try the recently released
> version 5.37 of smartmontools.

For instance, you should be able to do:

# smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda

for a SATA drive discovered as /dev/sda.  This works happily on my home box 
(except for some unknown attributes - see [1]).

The manual page says:

       -d TYPE, --device=TYPE
              Specifies  the  type of the device.  The valid arguments to this
              option are ata, scsi, marvell,  cciss,N  and  3ware,N.  If  this
              option  is  not  used  then  smartctl  will attempt to guess the
              device type from the device name.
[...]

If you forget to specify it then it considers /dev/sda a SCSI device and tries 
(unsuccessfully) to talk to it as such.

cheers!
Chris

[1] - Some of the SMART attributes are vendor specific and undocumented:

http://www.csamuel.org/2007/02/22/seagate-st3300622as-unknown-smart-attribute-190/


-- 
 Christopher Samuel - (03)9925 4751 - VPAC Deputy Systems Manager
 Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing http://www.vpac.org/
 Bldg 91, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton South, VIC 3053, Australia

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