Comments on: Smartmontools and Adaptec RAID controllers

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:50:00 +0000

Patrick, you did not pass any parameter to the -T option.

Try -T verypermissive

By: Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:02:39 +0000

Hi Joel, good point, I’ll try to put together a list of what controllers have which passthrough features. It might take a bit of time as I’ll have to try some of them to determine what is supported.

The latest controllers - series 2 and series 5 - support SCSI and SAT passthrough and will work with smartmontools for both SATA and SAS disks. There is a driver bug which appears when using the latest firmware documented here with a temporary workaround until a driver fix makes it into distributions.

http://linux.adaptec.com/2009/07/24/using-smartmontools-538-with-series-255z-controllers-with-firmware-17380-onwards/

Series-3 controllers support SCSI passthrough but in the standard code as shipped in the channel (non-OEM), do not support SAT passthough smartmontools will work with SAS but not SATA disks.

many thanks, Phil

By: Joel Franco

Joel Franco — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:08:16 +0000

Thank You by this information.

I didn’t know that could be possible to take the information passtrough the raid board.

It could be cool if you publish a table with the raid boards that this method supports; it’s dificul to us, users, to know how to get information from the raid device without open source consolidated tools.

By: Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:44:11 +0000

Hi Patrick, sorry for the delay. I’m not sure about this - I’ll have to give it a try (travelling at the moment so it would be later this week). You could try adding -T permissive on the end. It depends whether the firmware of the 2420 supports the SAT command. If you try - let me know what happens.

thanks, Phil

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:44:34 +0000

Hey, I was just wondering if this was also possible for the Adaptec ASR-2420SA.
Reading the information from /dev/sgX results in this message:

# smartctl –all /dev/sg0 -d sat -T
smartctl version 5.38 [i486-slackware-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=======> ARGUMENT REQUIRED FOR OPTION: T
=======> VALID ARGUMENTS ARE: normal, conservative, permissive, verypermissive

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:13:30 +0000

I answered my own question: modprobe sg and use the /dev/sgX devices instead.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:07:16 +0000

Is it possible to use smartctl with a 2420S? If not, what other ways can the health of the individual SCSI drives be monitored?

By: Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:47:47 +0000

Hi Mike, sorry for the delay. The ICP 5085BL is a different model to the Adaptec controllers and doesn’t follow the same model numbering convention. It has higher performance but is based on the same code base as the Adaptec series-3. Unfortunately this code base doesn’t support the SAT opcode as mentioned in my previous note. Consequently smartctl would work with SAS disks but not with SATA.

The controller will still forward any SMART warnings or errors generatedb by the drive to the management software / operating system.

Sorry for not being clearer over the model numbers - I remember thinking it would be challenging when the Adaptec series-5 controllers were launched.

many thanks, Phil

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 30 May 2009 17:58:02 +0000

Oh Ubuntu version is 9.04

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 30 May 2009 17:53:44 +0000

Hello,

I have a ICP5085BL and it does not work for me. OS is Ubuntu 9.10, newest firmware.

mike@host:/dev$ sudo smartctl –all -d sat /dev/sg10
smartctl version 5.38 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== 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: Sat May 30 20:54:03 2009 CEST
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.
Checking for SMART support by trying SMART ENABLE command.
SMART ENABLE appeared to work! Continuing.
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.

Any ideas?

Kind regards
Mike