SMART-capable firewire enclosure?

May 28, 2006 8:45 PM

Are there any Firewire or USB external hard drive enclosures that support translation of SMART messages?

I would like to use smartctl (on OS X) to monitor SMART error logs on an enternal hard drive, but haven't been able to find any enclosures that pass SMART messages over the bridge chip..

posted by rajbot to computers & internet (5 comments total)

As far as I'm aware the USB and Firewire block device specifications don't include SMART, so it's flat out not possible unless the specs are revised.
posted by russm at 9:46 PM on May 28, 2006

I'd suggest using external SATA.
posted by kindall at 10:41 PM on May 28, 2006

I also had problems with this, and after an exhaustive search for a couple of months, I also found what russm stated to be completely right - it's just not possible over USB and Firewire.

I've never used external SATA, but since it's a newer standard, it'd make sense.
posted by plaidrabbit at 12:02 PM on May 29, 2006

External SATA is the same as regular SATA, and you can get SMART data off SATA drives just fine.
posted by kindall at 9:16 AM on May 30, 2006

Of course the downside to eSATA is that you're not going to get the daisy chain and device-peering features of firewire. There are various ways to multiplex SATA (infiniband) but you don't get the same number of possible devices.

1394b for disk drives kicks ass compared to USB. A recent test with a drive on a combo usb2/1394b bridge card showed usb2 pulling around 14MB/sec max and 1394b getting over 60MB/sec. Direct IDE rose to 62MB/sec.
posted by wkearney99 at 4:07 PM on January 6, 2007