RFC: ATA to CAM integration patch

[Scott Long]

Ulrich Spörlein wrote:
> On Sat, 27.06.2009 at 12:06:04 -0600, Scott Long wrote:
>> Alexander Motin wrote:
>>> This is not a problem. ATA disks does not have SCSI INQUIRY command. 
>>> They use own IDENTIFY instead. inquiry should work for ATAPI devices, as 
>>> they are SCSI deep inside.
>> This is really the big missing piece in camcontrol; we need to add
>> support for getting the IDENT info and getting/setting various
>> attributes, as well as sending ATA commands over passthrough.
> 
> Hi Scott,
> 
> not sure if this is related, but I always wondered why tools like
> smartctl never work with USB attached ATA disks. Is it missing support
> in our drivers and smartctl or is it simply impossible?
> 

The possibility depends on several hardware and software factors.  If
the USB disk enclosure was speaking ATA all the way up to the umass 
driver, then it could be possible to add some extra intelligence to the
driver to make SMART work.  However, if the enclosure chip is speaking
anything else, then probably not.  As an alternative, you might try to
the ata-usb module instead and see if that works.

Scott