SMART decoder app

I’d like to see an app that would decode and present the SMART data from my hard drive. In my case it’s an SSD with SATA-USB adapter.

There is open source S.M.A.R.T. code out there. Has anyone done even an experiment with S.M.A.R.T.?

And, for a completely different way of looking at it: has anyone tried connecting a Filecore formatted disc to a Linux box to get S.M.A.R.T. information? Are the wanted disc data changed by so doing?

The format of the drive is not important, the host OS doesn’t need to be able to read the contents of the disc, only detect a storage device of some type is present and if the interface supports the ATA protocol it can attempt to read the S.M.A.R.T information.

I agree that the host OS doesn’t need to write to the disc; but that’s not really the point. My question is about whether the host OS does something to the drive because it doesn’t recognise the format. Or maybe, even worse, there’s a partition table that RISC OS ignores (because it doesn’t need it) that might persuade the host OS that it should or can write something.

I really don’t want to connect my main SSD to a Linux box to interrogate S.M.A.R.T. only to have Linux alter one (or more) sectors that hold my data.

Linux and even Windows wont do anything to a drive they don’t recognise, they will just wait for you to format it as something they understand, but if you don’t you can still interrogate the S.M.A.R.T information.

I put RISC OS drives on Linux boxes all the time to clone them, never had any issues.

SMART over USB is tricky because SMART is fundamentally an ATA command set. To run that over USB your USB-SATA bridge needs to support some means of sending the device raw ATA commands. Some do, some don’t, some do it in different ways.

It would make sense to have a SMART implementation that worked for native ATA (IDE and SATA drives connected directly to the motherboard), and then maybe look into implementing it for USB. But it won’t work for all USB bridges because not all have a way to let the SMART commands through, so any support would be patchy.