Is SMART disabled in all portable USB hard drives?
Solution 1
In Linux we have smartmontools
. Its website gives the insight. The most important fragment:
To access SMART functionality,
smartmontools
must be able to send ATA commands directly to the disk. For USB devices, at least the following conditions must be met:
- The USB bridge provides an ATA pass-through command.
- This command is supported by
smartmontools
.- The operating system provides a SCSI pass-through I/O-control which works through its USB-layer.
- SCSI support is implemented in the operating system interface of
smartmontools
.
Notice there are conditions independent of smartmontools
. I guess the situation is similar with whatever tool you use.
I had two USB adapters and only one of them let me use SMART functionality (tested with one and the same HDD).
Solution 2
No, it is not disabled. I own four Western Digital 2 TB external drives, and all four report their data using CrystalDisk under Windows 10.
Your issue is probably the tool or the OS you use.
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unfa
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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unfa over 1 year
I own a few portable USB hard disk drives.
Recently after replacing my laptop's failing drive I was using GSmartControl (Linux) to access the SMART data on my disks, looks like all the external drives that have USB connectivity don't have SMART support.
I own 2 ADATA HD710 drives and a Western Digital MyBook 3 TB. All use USB 3.0 connectivity.
I use one ADATA drive for daily inceremental backups, and the 3 TB drive for only-copy of old data and backup disk images of my family's laptops etc.
I'm pretty sure the MyBook has a standard big SATA drive inside. Is exposing the SMART features not possible with a USB interface? Or is this something else?
On the other hand my SanDisk 32 GB USB 3.0 pendrive reports to be SMART-enabled (while displaying no data at all).
What's the matter? How do I know if my backup medium is in good shape if it won't even report bad blocks? Should I stop using USB drives for backups?
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Ploni almost 6 years"GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from smartmontools package)" (from the GSmartControl website).