USB drives with no phantom load

Re:USB drives with no phantom load by Abishek_Muthian on Sunday September 09, 2018 @01:37AM (#17944537)

Tangentially, I'm curious on how OP monitors health of USB drives.

Getting SMART data from USB drives has been a pain on linux as the kernel rejects SAT ATA pass-through commands & so doesn't work with smartmontools[1].

I have tested across different USB 3.0 drives such as Seagate Backup Plus, MYDIGITALSSD|OTG, SAMSUNG Portable SSD T5 all of which use 'uas' driver under linux & if used with USB 3.0 hub like Tplink USB 3.0 port hub; it bridges using 'hub/4p' driver.

After trying out several other methods in vain, the only tool which I found to be helpful in checking for USB drive health on linux is discscan[2]; which tests for unreadable sectors & latency without using SMART values.

[1]: https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/USB

[2]: https://github.com/baruch/diskscan

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Re:USB drives with no phantom load by Vogtinator on Sunday September 09, 2018 @05:42AM (#17945144)

I have never any issues with USB HDDs with smartctl.

In the rare cases where autodetection did not work, smartctl -d <type> with trial and error works.

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Re:USB drives with no phantom load by Abishek_Muthian on Sunday September 09, 2018 @06:43AM (#17945281)

I see, I forgot to mention - d scsi gives only basic manufacturer info and tests fail.

Does your drive work in uas mode?

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