SMART disk through USB

[Carl Lowenstein]

I have a Maxtor 60GB disk drive which is presently in a small tabletop
box, connected to an ATA to USB bridge.  When I connect the signal
cable to a USB port on my Fedora Core 2 system, the drive is recognized
as /dev/sda, first SCSI disk.

All original partitions of the disk are recognized, they can be mounted
and work just like a "real disk".  That's good.

The tabletop box seems to get rather warm, and I would like to ask the
SMART system in the drive how hot it is in there.  But /usr/sbin/smartctl
seems not to be able to cope with an ATA drive connected to a USB bridge
which is then software mapped as SCSI.  Three attempts to use smartctl
are shown below:

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Try #1, just run smartctl
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[cdl at delta cdl]$ sudo /usr/sbin/smartctl -a /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.33 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-4 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
 
Device: Maxtor 6 Y060P0           Version: YAR4
scsiModePageOffset: response length too short, resp_len=4 offset=4 bd_len=0
>> Terminate command early due to bad response to IEC mode page
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.
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Try #2, try '-T permissive'
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[cdl at delta cdl]$ sudo /usr/sbin/smartctl -a -T permissive /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.33 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-4 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
 
Device: Maxtor 6 Y060P0           Version: YAR4
scsiModePageOffset: response length too short, resp_len=4 offset=4 bd_len=0
>> Terminate command early due to bad response to IEC mode page
 
Error Counter logging not supported
 
Error Events logging not supported
scsiModePageOffset: response length too short, resp_len=4 offset=4 bd_len=0
Device does not support Self Test logging
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Try #3, tell smartctl that this is really an ata drive.
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[cdl at delta cdl]$ sudo /usr/sbin/smartctl -a -T permissive -d ata /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.33 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-4 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
 
Smartctl: Device Read Identity Failed (not an ATA/ATAPI device)
 
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     [No Information Found]
Serial Number:    [No Information Found]
Firmware Version: [No Information Found]
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   1
ATA Standard is:  Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is:    Mon Sep 27 22:32:13 2004 PDT
SMART is only available in ATA Version 3 Revision 3 or greater.
We will try to proceed in spite of this.
SMART support is: Ambiguous - ATA IDENTIFY DEVICE words 82-83 don't show if SMART supported.
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.
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A 160GB Maxtor drive from the same drive family, connected as /dev/hdb,
tells smartctl more than I ever wanted to know.

The only beginning of a clue that I have is that the model number
is reported as 6 Y060P0, while the smartmontools Drive Database
would like to see 6Y060P0, without the space.

    carl