[smartmontools-support] Checking SMART capability in disks

[Arun Anbalagan]

Dear All,
We are proposing our customers to use 'smartmontools' to regularly monitor
the disk health. But, they don't want to install new software, unless they
know that their disks are indeed SMART capable. They are looking for a way
to check if 'smartmontools' would really work on their disks, before they
install it on their systems. Can you please let me know how I can check if
a disk is SMART capable or not, without using 'smartctl'? This needs to be
tested on Windows and Linux platforms. Thanks.

Regards,
Arun.

[Christian Franke]

Post by Arun Anbalagan
Dear All,
We are proposing our customers to use 'smartmontools' to regularly
monitor the disk health. But, they don't want to install new software,
unless they know that their disks are indeed SMART capable. They are
looking for a way to check if 'smartmontools' would really work on
their disks, before they install it on their systems. Can you please
let me know how I can check if a disk is SMART capable or not, without
using 'smartctl'?

Virtually all ATA/SATA HDDs and SDDs support ATA SMART Feature Set.

Post by Arun Anbalagan
This needs to be tested on Windows and Linux platforms. Thanks.

Smartmontools uses pass-through I/O-controls to access the SMART
functionality. It depends on platform, protocol (ATA/SCSI/NVMe), driver,
RAID controller[1], USB bridge[2], ... whether this works or not.
Especially on Windows, it is often not documented whether a specific
driver supports pass-through I/O-controls.

Therefore a test with smartctl is needed in many cases.

Thanks,
Christian

[1]
https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/Supported_RAID-Controllers
[2]
https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/USB