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I'm having difficulty getting SMART Attributes from drives in an OWC Mercury Rack Pro. I can successfully get all the drive info, but I get nothing past the START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION.

It is currently connected via eSATA to a thunderbolt/eSATA adapter to a MacBook Pro with MacOS (have also tried Debian). The problem is with the OWC unit as I can successfully get Drive Attributes from the same HDD connected via the thunderbolt/eSATA adapter.

Below is the output from smartctl -a /dev/disk2

smartctl 7.0 2018-12-30 r4883 [Darwin 18.6.0 x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-18, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Toshiba 3.5" DT01ACA... Desktop HDD
Device Model:     TOSHIBA DT01ACA200
Serial Number:    3632VMTTS
Firmware Version: 0961
User Capacity:    2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ATA/ATAPI-7 (minor revision not indicated)
Local Time is:    Sun Dec 29 01:38:45 2019 CST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status:  (0x00) Offline data collection activity
                    was never started.
                    Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
Total time to complete Offline 
data collection:        (    0) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities:            (0x00)     Offline data collection not supported.
SMART capabilities:            (0x0000) Automatic saving of SMART data                  is not implemented.
Error logging capability:        (0x00) Error logging NOT supported.
                    No General Purpose Logging support.

SMART Error Log not supported

SMART Self-test Log not supported

Selective Self-tests/Logging not supported

The information section looks fine. But the START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION is the problem. Has anyone seen similar output? I am thinking the OWC enclosure is sadly not passing all the SMART data to the eSATA output. Thought I would post here first before making a ticket on smartmontools in case I am missing something.

EDIT FOR REFERENCE The device ID given when connected via USB is 0x1e91:0xb0b5 (0x2802) with syntax idVendor:idProduct (bcdDevice).

sevve
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1 Answers1

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Alright, so I received a response from Other World Computing (OWC) technical support about the issue of SMART Attributes on the OWC Mercury Rack Pro. Apparently, the enclosure does not support "SMART data".

From OWC: "...the enclosure itself does not support SMART data on the drive. This is due to the design of the enclosure, however the enclosure should also alert you if there are any issues with the drive."

Sadly, this seems to pretty definitively answer the question.

I still might try and investigate with a smartmontools ticket in case the OWC tech support answer is incorrect. I thought I would get a different output from running smartctl if the device did not support SMART data outright (I am able to get accurate drive information from smartctl, so it must be passing some SMART data).

UPDATE

It works now. Not entirely trusting the tech support answer, I took apart the device and identified the IC's it uses in the controller. My particular unit uses JMB393 (SATA/Raid Controller), JMB321 (SATA Port Multiplier), and JMS539 (SATA to USB 3.0), among other chips.

Searching for more answers on smartmontools.org, I discovered they released version 7.1 in late December 2019 (a DAY after I posted this original question HAHA) which includes experimental support for the JMicron chip series JMB39x (check out the ticket that initiated the feature here https://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/705 kinda cool).

I now get a full list of SMART Attributes from the drive (including the main attribute I wanted, temperature) by using the new device option jmb39x,N. The full command is (for device /dev/sdd):

sudo smartctl -a -d jmb39x,0 /dev/sdd

The integer N in jmb39x,N indicates the port number, so for my four bay device I cycle through 0,1,2, and 3. Note that this is successful when connecting via USB or eSATA, which is awesome.

Read more about how to use the feature and the 7.1 update itself here https://www.smartmontools.org/changeset/5029 and here https://www.smartmontools.org/browser/tags/RELEASE_7_1/smartmontools/NEWS.

sevve
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