Re: [PLUG] firewire drive errors

[Greg Lopp <lopp@pobox.com>]

Jeff Abrahamson wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 10, 2006 at 09:31:11AM -0400, Flint Heart wrote:
>   
> > I'm also using smartd to monitor my disks now. hopefully I'll get a
> > heads up before a drive goes down (which i've heard you will
> > ususally get smart errors before the disk will actually go belly up
> > on you)
> >     
>
> Smartd is good, but it appears only to work on internal drives.  Is it
> possible to make it work with external firewire drives?  Inside their
> enclosure they're still IDE.
>   
But your system(where you'd be running smartd) doesn't know that and 
doesn't care.  The only thing that it knows is that it talks to it via 
SCSI.  This would be the case both for firewire and USB drives. 

So, what is the equivalent of smartd for SCSI drives?......no, wait, the 
smartd manpage indicates that it does work with SCSI.  It also says that 
it uses a drive's internal "Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting 
Technology (SMART)".  Could be that your enclosure, which translates the 
firewire encapsulated SCSI commands to IDE, does not support the set of 
SCSI commands required to invoke the SMART. 

Not sure about firewire, but I know that on the USB world, a drive is 
not required to support more than about five commands.  Those five are 
enough to report its capacity, indicate that it's ready (spun up), read 
and write.  I would not be surprised if firewire requires the same SCSI 
subset as USB.

I'd recommend making contact with the firewire maintainers.  They may 
have more experience with your enclosure and/or issues with Maxtor.  The 
problem could be on the protocol level with your enclosure - your input 
could result in a more robust firewire drive driver.

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