Prompted by recent discussions about SSD vs HDD I decided to check out my devices with smartctl. But I'm overwhelmed by the smartctl man page! My main disk - sda - is reported to be fine :) My backup disk - sdb - is not found # smartctl -P show /dev/sdb smartctl 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594 [x86_64-linux-4.12.14-lp150.12.7-default] (SUSE RPM) Copyright (C) 2002-17, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org /dev/sdb: Unknown USB bridge [0x4971:0xce23 (0x000)] Please specify device type with the -d option. Use smartctl -h to get a usage summary So I tried telling it that the disk is SATA and with that it can find it: # smartctl -P show -d sat /dev/sdb smartctl 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594 [x86_64-linux-4.12.14-lp150.12.7-default] (SUSE RPM) Copyright (C) 2002-17, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org Drive found in smartmontools Database. Drive identity strings: MODEL: Hitachi HDS721010CLA332 FIRMWARE: JP4OA3EA match smartmontools Drive Database entry: MODEL REGEXP: (Hitachi )?HDS7210((16|25)CLA[36]82|(32|50)CLA[36]62|(64|75|10)CLA[36]3[02]) FIRMWARE REGEXP: .* MODEL FAMILY: Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C ATTRIBUTE OPTIONS: None preset; no -v options are required. but how do I get it to actually scan it regularly like my main disk? I installed GSmartControl in the hope it would be simpler to use. But the Help/Help button does nothing, and for my backup disk it says: Drive information: /dev/sdb (scsi), 1.00 TB, HDS721010CLA332 Basic health check: Unknown Model family: Unknown and the checkboxes to Enable SMART and to Enable Offline Data Collection are both greyed out. So how come it doesn't seem to be able to access the same data as smartctl? Does anybody use it, or is it really as useless as it seems? YaST Partitioner can see it without me having to do anything special, why can't smart? Similar questions also apply to an SD card I happen to have plugged in at the moment! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org