Scanner: SMART through SAT layer?

Philmatic

First of all, I just want to say I love your scanner product! I've been testing DrivePool for a few weeks and I have some issues with it (I'll post those in the DrivePool forum) but Scanner is a pretty impressive piece of software. I fully intend on buying it and DrivePool soon, but I need to do a bit more testing.

I have three Dell M1015's (LSI 9211 chipset) MegaRaid cards flashed to IT mode so they are simple HBAs serving up to 24 disks in my Norco RPC-4224. I currently have 16 of those slots filled, and the disks work fine. I have no problems reading, writing or scanning the disks, however I'm not getting any SMART data passed through.

Apparently, most SAS cards uses a ATA to SCSI translation layer to translate regular ATA commands to their SCSI equivalent since they are technically SAS controllers. So make sure it wasn't an issue with the card, I downloaded and ran smartctl to probe the cards, and while I wasn't able to retrieve any SMART data in normal mode, when I passed in the "-d sat" argument, all the SMART data came back fine.

I'm wondering if you could add support for probing this SAT layer vs directly through ATA?

Here is a discussion at servethehome where we figured it out: http://forums.servethehome.com/showthread.php?433-IBM-M1015-Experiences

Here is a link to the smartctl manpage where it explains the sat layer: http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/man/smartctl.8.html

"sat - the device type is SCSI to ATA Translation (SAT). This is for ATA disks that have a SCSI to ATA Translation (SAT) Layer (SATL) between the disk and the operating system. SAT defines two ATA PASS THROUGH SCSI commands, one 12 bytes long and the other 16 bytes long. The default is the 16 byte variant which can be overridden with either '-d sat,12' or '-d sat,16'."

Alex

The Scanner has supported SAT since 1.0 for USB devices. I think the 16 command was added later IIRC.

I guess we need to enable this for non USB devices as well.

johnpoz

So was this in one of the older betas and then removed?  I just posted this thread

http://forum.covecube.com/discussion/623/smart-info-was-working-now-gone#Item_3

And with the -d sat yup can see the smartinfo, now scanner was showing me smart when I first installed it.  But I finally got around to buying both scanner and drivepool.  And once reinstall of latest scanner -- smart is not working

Philmatic

In the latest changelog: Disabled SAT for non-USB drives by default. Enable unsafe mode to use (.config).

Alex

Yes, it was crashing systems, so that's not good. It's off by default now.

See my post here on enabling it:

http://forum.covecube.com/discussion/623/smart-info-was-working-now-gone