Why can't I get SMART with sata drives?

Telexen · Apprentice Joined: 09 Oct 2005 Posts: 189

I was pretty sure that SATA drives support smart. I go into my BIOS and can see options for SMART, but it's greyed out and "Disabled" for two of my three SATA drives, and the third says "None". Obviously I can't get anything SMART related to work in Gentoo because of this.

Does anyone know why I'm not able to set this option for my drives?

drescherjm · Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 1:29 am Post subject:

Telexen · Apprentice Joined: 09 Oct 2005 Posts: 189

The motherboard is a couple years old. it's an Asus K8N-DL (dual socket 939). Uses the nVidia SATA II chip (it has a silicon image 3114 but I don't use it).

And I am using the latest BIOS

I haven't ever noticed if it's always been this way or not in this BIOS...I have run a diagnostic on one of my Seagate drives with their utility before though, and could have sworn it reported something along the lines of, "SMART: OK"

It just seems weird to me that the option is disabled though. I have one more drive in it right now that isn't connected - I'll try later connecting it to either SATA controllers to see if I have the option there.

drescherjm · Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 2:34 am Post subject:

Telexen · Apprentice Joined: 09 Oct 2005 Posts: 189

Telexen · Apprentice Joined: 09 Oct 2005 Posts: 189

I connected a drive to the SI controller - which has no BIOS options for SMART - but smartmontools saw it as off as well and I couldn't turn it on.

Rob1n · Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 7:49 am Post subject:

You may need to specify the "-d ata" option to the smartmontools applications to force them to recognise the drive as an ATA device.

drescherjm · Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 1:43 pm Post subject:

Ok. The kernel is not the problem.