Unable to enable SMART support for external hard drive

Question

I use my recently bought 1T Seagate Backup Plus Slim external hard disk ID 0bc2:ab24 Seagate RSS LLC (NTFS filesystem) as a backup tool. I want to run the Smartmontools software on this disk, but when I tried to enable it using

smartctl -s on -d scsi /dev/sdb (as a root)

I got the following response:

smartctl 6.6 2016-05-31 r4324 [i686-linux-4.15.0-23-generic] (local b$
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontoo$

=== START OF ENABLE/DISABLE COMMANDS SECTION ===
Informational Exceptions (SMART) disabled
Temperature warning disabled

Indeed when I try to run for example

smartctl -all -d scsi /dev/sdb

the output is:

smartctl 6.6 2016-05-31 r4324 [i686-linux-4.15.0-23-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               Seagate
Product:              BUP Slim WH
Revision:             0304
Compliance:           SPC-4
User Capacity:        1.000.204.885.504 bytes [1,00 TB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Logical Unit id:      0x5000000000000001
Serial number:        NA9DTQ90
Device type:          disk
Local Time is:        Wed Jun 20 20:25:13 2018 CEST
SMART support is:     Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is:     Disabled
Temperature Warning:  Disabled or Not Supported

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: OK
Current Drive Temperature:     0 C
Drive Trip Temperature:        0 C

Error Counter logging not supported

Device does not support Self Test logging

which confirms that the SMART support is still disabled, but that is available. Does anyone have an idea if and (if so) how to enable it?

FYI: The drive is connected to an old 32-bit laptop that runs Lubuntu 18.04.

Solution

Have you checked this question on askubuntu? https://askubuntu.com/questions/207573/how-to-enable-smart If this fails, it could be that your USB enclosure doesn't support SMART, I experienced this with one enclosure of mine. In that case you would need to connect the drive directly via SATA or use a different enclosure to retrieve SMART data from the device.

Comments

[Lollen Jumplan]

Can you elaborate further on what you mean by "specifying the BUS"? It would be interesting to see the output of "smartctl --scan", particularly what kind of device your drive seems to be. The manual suggests that sometimes it could be useful for external enclosures to specify the type manually by "-d sat" or a different type, see "man smartmontools". Also, you could use smartmontools with "-x" instead of "-a" to get possibly even more information for debugging.

[ksyrium]

On the page askubuntu.com/questions/207573/how-to-enable-smart it is hinted at that details of the BUS connection could help establishing SMART support. The output of smartctl --scan | grep sdb is /dev/sdb -d scsi # /dev/sdb, SCSI device. I just ran smartctl with only -x as an argument (so without -d scsi) and it showed that SMART now is enabled! I don't know what triggered it (maybe a software upgrade?)... B.t.w. It also works fine with -a.

[Lollen Jumplan]

Nice to see your problem is resolved now. Even though the cause of your problem seems to remain unknown. Maybe it will become clear at a later time.

[ksyrium]

I just found out that it seems to work when smartctl --scan indicates that the HDD is an SCSI device. For some reason it sometimes seems to erroneously display another device, but there's no problem after a reboot without unmounting the drive.