Other External products

[piokas]

I just bought 2 TB expansion drive, third in a row. First I bought one year ago, the secong several months ago and the third - yesterday. First two had SMART monitoring via USB, and the third - this one bought recently - doesn't provide such function. Of course for any reasonable thinking computer user such disc is completely useless crud.  I HAVE TO KNOW not only currrent disc temperature but above all - the number of bad sectors, spin/transfer rate etc. If some user doesn't take care of it is enough stupid to have anything but not modern computer equipment. In such circumstances I will carefully check if some SG product has such monitoring and without that I will never buy it in future. Or maybe I am wrong? And there is a way to obtain necessary data covered somewhere? I need urgent answer cause I do not know - to bring the disk back to shop or not.

[AskTheLeaf]

If you need to run a diagnostic test on your Expansion hard drive, please use our SeaTools for Windows utility:

http://www.seagate.com/support/internal-hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/saturn/seatools-win-maste...

This is the only diagnostic utility officially approved by Seagate for testing the drive.

[spinningwheel]

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AskTheLeaf wrote:

If you need to run a diagnostic test on your Expansion hard drive, please use our SeaTools for Windows utility:

http://www.seagate.com/support/internal-hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/saturn/seatools-win-maste...

This is the only diagnostic utility officially approved by Seagate for testing the drive.

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Well... ironically SeaTools for Windows was the one of three diagnostic tools I tried that did not support SMART for the Expansion Desktop 3TB drive. It makes a great first impression when you bring up Seagate's software for your new drive and it says SMART wasn't available. I also wonder how a tool should judge about RMA/drive failure if it cannot even read out SMART values.

[fzabkar]

Try HD Sentinel, HDDScan, smartmontools. Unless Seagate has switched to an unsupported USB-SATA bridge IC, then one or more of those tools should work.

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows / Linux):
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HDDScan for Windows:
http://hddscan.com/

smartmontools project:
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

[spinningwheel]

I did NOT manage to get SMART values from smartmontools (smartctl command with -d usbcypress and others).

The ones that worked were:

• HD Tune Pro (not: HD Tune)
• CrystalDiskInfo

The ones that I could not get to yield SMART values were:

• SeaTools for Windows
• smartmontools (Ubuntu 12.10)

That is for the 3TB drive model.

[fzabkar]

Thanks for the update.

Cypress Semiconductor's bridges are quite old. Nowadays "-d sat,12" and "-d sat" appear to be the most common options for Seagate external drives in smartmontools.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/Supported_USB-Devices

I know that Seagate used Initio Corp's bridges in some of their FreeAgent products, and Initio bridges appear to require the "sat" or "sat,12" options. One way you may be able to determine the identity of the bridge IC without dismantling your drive might be to connect the USB cable without powering on the drive. Some FreeAgent drives identify themselves as "Initio Default Controllers" under these circumstances. You can then see the Product ID and Vendor ID of the bridge instead of Seagate's IDs.

Here is a Microsoft tool that I find useful:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_IDs/UVCView.x86.exe

[spinningwheel]

Thanks a lot for taking the time, fzabkar.

Shame on me for what I said about smartctl. In fact I did not try "sat,12" mode.

When reading your post, I noticed that I made a bad wrong assumption: With no other external drive attached `lsusb` showed a Cypress SATA Bridge. Although the vendor/device id pointed out a rather old USB 2.0 one, I failed to notice that the Cypress bride was actually an internal one used to attach the internal dvd drive. (Linux ran on an old VAIO notebook I am not too familiar with.)

Back to Seagate: Unfortunately, I don't have the 3TB Expansion Desktop anymore. So I cannot try the trick to find out about the bridge model. Which would be interesting to know, as apparently inside Seagate's drive it does an unfortunate emulation of 4kb logical sector size. I am still curious if there is a way to turn that off.

[fzabkar]

I saw your other threads on the subject, and I am aware of WD's Quick Formatter for external drives. This utility appears to modify one or more bytes in the bridge firmware. However, I don't know whether Seagate has an equivalent utility for their own products.