On 11/22/05 6:49 PM, "Carlos E. R."
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The Tuesday 2005-11-22 at 17:22 -0500, Ian Marlier wrote:
SATA disks are actually pretty well supported by smartctl; I use it to run scheduled tests, and health monitoring, on about 35 SATA systems.
I'm glad to hear that. The README.SATA led me to think the contrary - I see now that it doen't work only for some:
README for S.M.A.R.T. on SATA discs
Smartmontools should work correctly with SATA drives under both Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, if you use the standard IDE drivers. If you use libata drivers, you need at least kernel 2.6.11. For older versions it won't work correctly because libata didn't support the needed ATA-passthrough ioctl() calls. For more read http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/.
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If, however the IDE driver doesn't support your particular SATA controller, or the controller doesn't have a legacy interface at all, then only libata can be used.
As far as we know, the IDE driver only works on Intel, VIA and nVidia controllers.
Perhaps the situation has improved in SuSE 10. Could you expand on it?
I'm actually running 9.3 Pro on all of the aforementioned systems. Kernel is 2.6.11.4-20a. Some of the systems use the standard IDE disk driver; others use libata. The drives are all Western Digital, ranging from 36GB at the small end to 350GB at the high end. They're variously connected to 3ware SATA RAID cards, Silicon Integrated controllers (sata_sil will appear in modprobe if your machine has one of these), and some other kind of a controller that I can't remember off the top of my head. I've also tested smartctl with another manufacturer's drive, in one of these systems, and it worked fine there, too. I think that drive was a Seagate, but don't quote me on it. The only thing that doesn't always work is drive manufacturer/model identification; quite a few SATA drives just aren't in the smartctl database. However, the test and monitor functions work fine regardless. Basically, you should be able to use smartctl with a SATA drive on a 9.3 Pro system or newer. Below that, and you're going to have to do some playing with kernel versions and alternate driver modules in order to get it going.