USB devices and smartmontools

To access USB storage devices, the operating system sends SCSI commands through the USB transport to the device. If the USB device is actually a PATA or SATA disk in an USB enclosure, the firmware of its USB bridge chip translates these commands into the corresponding ATA commands. This works straightforward for read and write commands, but not for SMART commands.

To access SMART functionality, smartmontools must be able to send ATA commands directly to the disk. For USB devices, at least the following conditions must be met:

• The USB bridge provides an ATA pass-through command.
• This command is supported by smartmontools.
• The operating system provides a SCSI pass-through I/O-control which works through its USB-layer.
• SCSI support is implemented in the operating system interface of smartmontools.

Some recent USB bridges already support the vendor independent SAT (SCSI/ATA Translation, ANSI INCITS 431-2007) standard. Other USB bridges provide vendor specific ATA pass-through commands. The current version of smartmontools supports the following pass-through commands and USB bridges:

Command	USB bridges	smartctl option	48-bit ATA support	Comment
SAT ATA pass-through 12 and 16	various (ASMedia, Initio, Oxford, newer JMicron, ...)	-d sat[,16]; -d sat,12	requires '-d sat[,16]'	Older Linux kernels may require '-d sat,12'
Cypress ATACB	Cypress CY7C68300B/C (AT2LP), CY7C68310 (ISD-300LP)	-d usbcypress[,CMD]	No	CY7C68300A (AT2) may not work.
JMicron ATA pass-through	JMicron JM20329, JM20335-39, Prolific PL2507/3507	-d usbjmicron[,p][,x][,PORT]	Yes (SATA only)	'-d usbjmicron,x' enables 48-bit support
Prolific ATA pass-through	Prolific PL2571/2771/2773/2775	-d usbprolific	Yes	SMART access via eSATA may not work (ticket #719)
Sunplus ATA pass-through	Sunplus SPIF215/6, SPIF225/6	-d usbsunplus	Yes

Smartmontools was successfully tested with many USB devices on several Platforms. If the USB ID can be obtained from the operating system, smartmontools also supports auto-detection of (the already tested) USB devices. Then it is not necessary to specify the '-d' option. See the following table for details:

Platform	...has SCSI pass-through	smartmontools supports SCSI	... supports USB	... auto-detection	... in smartd DEVICESCAN	Comment
Linux	Yes	Yes	YES	YES	YES	See comment about SAT in above table
Mac OS X	No	No	(Yes)	(Yes)	(Yes)	via OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver, see below
FreeBSD	Yes	Yes	YES	YES	YES
NetBSD	Yes	Yes	YES	No	No
OpenBSD	Yes	Yes	YES	No	No
Solaris	Yes	Yes	YES	No	No
QNX	?	No	No	No	No
OS/2	?	No	No	No	No
Windows	Yes	Yes	YES	YES	YES

The ​OS X SAT SMART Driver provides access to SMART data for SAT, JMicron and Sunplus capable USB and Firewire devices on Mac OS X. On OSX El Capitan (10.11+) you may need a signed driver, which can be downloaded from the ​DriveDx website. Note that this does not support 48-bit ATA commands (-l xerror) or non-SMART ATA commands (-s apm,N). Full USB support would require SCSI pass-through support which does not yet exist on Mac OS X.