SMART Automatic Offline Testing periodicity

[Dan Lukes]

Currently, the
-o on
option enable the Automatic Offline Testing for every 4 hours. It is hard-coded constant.

I know the concept of Automatic Offline Testing is obsolete, some vendors doesn't implement such command at all, while others accept it, but consider it NOOP.

Despite of it, on the drives where implemented as non-void would be nice to have a way how to request different time.

I would like to introduce backward compatible option

-o on[,N]

where N specify the time in the form
<number>[<unit>]

Unit may be 's' for seconds, 'm' for minutes, 'h' for hours. Seconds assumed when not present.

Missing N is assumed to be 4h to maintain backward compatibility.

The time is rounded to nearest lower available value (with exception that 1-4s are rounded to 5s). Such value is reported back to user in place of original message

SMART Automatic Offline Testing Enabled every four hours.

[Dan Lukes]

Committed as r3018, r3019

Unfortunately, my English is far from perfect. Can someone update appropriate manual pages and help texts ?

[Christian Franke]

The command SMART ENABLE/DISABLE AUTOMATIC OFF-LINE (features=0xdb) was not part of ATA-3 and was marked obsolete in ATA-4 (1999). It is only defined in SFF-8035i 2.0 (1996).

According to SFF_8035i, the command supports only enable (count=0xf8) or disable (count=0x00), remaining values are declared vendor-specific.

[Dan Lukes]

Hm ...

In such case the enhancement is meaningless

Reverted by r3020 back to r3017 state.

[Christian Franke]

Just for info:

The table at source:/trunk/smartmontools/utility.cpp@3018#L782​ specifies the standby timer periods for the IDLE command (0xe3) introduced in ATA-2. This is unrelated to SMART Offline Testing.