Re: Mediasonic 8 Bay External Hard Drive Enclosure connected via USB 3.0

Hi Christian,

Thanks for the detailed reply and great info. Good call on the age of the ticket!

So yes, just verified "smartctl -d usbjimcron,N ... /dev/sdX" returns errors such as:

Read Device Identity failed: scsi error unsupported field in scsi command
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.

I try adding "-T permissive" (or even verypermissive) and get this:

Read Device Identity failed: scsi error unsupported field in scsi command
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     ???
Serial Number:    ?
Firmware Version: ?????
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   Unknown(0x1ac0) (unknown minor revision code: 0x045a)
Local Time is:    Mon Jul 14 20:08:44 2014 PDT
SMART support is: Ambiguous - ATA IDENTIFY DEVICE words 82-83 don't show if SMART supported.
SMART support is: Ambiguous - ATA IDENTIFY DEVICE words 85-87 don't show if SMART is enabled.
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.

And yes, not including the beginning lines of output but I'm running this on Arch Linux with kernel 3.15.5 and smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841.

And I just tried it with "-d sat". Can't believe it but it works! All 8 disks are showing up. Thank you thank you thank you! I guess the "[USB JMicron]" in the initial error output had me focusing on using the usbjmicron switches.

Thanks again!

Graham
On Jul 14, 2014, at 2:43 AM, Christian Franke <[email protected]> wrote:

> Graham Fleming wrote:
> 
>> Thanks a lot for the reply. I'll admit I don't fully understand what
>> you are saying, but the staement that it only works with 2 devices
>> seems contradictory to the info on the supported devices page where
>> the Mediasonic Pro Box 4 Bay Enclosure is listed as supported. And the
>> associated ticket (http://www.smartmontools.org/ticket/95) appears to
>> show that it does work with all 4 drives.
>> 
> 
> The ATA pass-through of JMicron USB bridges supports only 2 ports (-d usbjmicron,0 and ,1) regardless of a port multiplier behind(!) the USB bridge (see also comment #1 of the ticket).
> 
> If you actually have tested "smartctl -d usbjmicron,N ... /dev/sdX" for N=0,1 and /dev/sdX="all disks from this box", then JMicron's ATA pass-through does (no longer) work with this box.
> 
> (BTW: You didn't include smartctl's first output line, so I assume by default that you are using a recent smartctl version under Linux)
> 
> 
>> Does seeing how the 4-bay works make any sense with how the 8-bay
>> might work?
>> 
> 
> The ticket is 4+ years old and the hard/firmware of recent models may have changed considerably without notice. The ticket reporter's test result ("usbjmicron,0 ... appeared to successfully give the info for the first disk") is very different from your test results.
> 
> There is a chance that JMicron now supports SAT. Try "-d sat" option with some /dev/sdX from the box.
> 
> Please also report the USB ID and bcdDevice value of the box ("lsusb ...").
> 
> Thanks,
> Christian
> 
> 
> 


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