IBM M1015 HDD Smart

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pettakos

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Oct 9, 2012
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I installed a recently acquired Ibm M1015 flashed in IT mode in a Win7 machine, attached 7 drives (all WD 2TB and 3TB Greens), works flawlessly
very satisfied, but it does not passthrough any smart hard drive data.
How can I overcome this annoyance, if I can?
 

john4200

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Jan 1, 2011
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Not enough information.

What exactly are you trying to do with SMART, and how are you trying to do it?

My M1015 HBAs work fine with smartctl, by the way.
 

pettakos

New Member
Oct 9, 2012
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I used to attach my hard drives to a Supermicro AOC-SALP-MV8, since it was the only controller I had.
Using it under Win 7 X64 with Drive Bender as storage pooling utility, S.M.A.R.T. data was displayed for each one of the drives.
So, I bought Ibm M1015 in order to get rid of the Supermicro. I installed it, boot the machine, drives recognized, even in Drive Bender, all went smoothly, but it does not provide any S.M.A.R.T. data.
The other minor issue that I am running into, is that it takes a long time to boot.
Eventually it does.
 

pettakos

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Oct 9, 2012
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I am also not booting from the controller, I am using an Intel 520 60GB ssd for the OS, the controller is solely used for data drives.
 

john4200

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Jan 1, 2011
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I installed it, boot the machine, drives recognized, even in Drive Bender, all went smoothly, but it does not provide any S.M.A.R.T. data.
What is "it"? Why can you not provide sufficient information for people to answer your question?

How, exactly are you trying to access SMART data?
 

john4200

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Jan 1, 2011
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I needed the -d sat switch added at end
Maybe that is necessary with the Windows port of smartctl.

Did you ever try running Crystal Disk Info or gsmartcontrol in Windows on a drive connected through an M1015? (I haven't....all my M1015 cards are in a linux server).
 

mobilenvidia

Moderator
Sep 25, 2011
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New Zealand
I have no need for SMART, only tested it because I could at the time.

I now only boot from the M1015 in IR mode with couple of SSD's in RAID0 and keep a couple of spindles on there
All my drives are on the LSI9261 at the mo
 

odditory

Moderator
Dec 23, 2010
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No SAS controller that I'm aware of - M1015 included - will pass SMART natively to Windows the way common "motherboard SATA" will. Its simply the nature of the SCSI layer/driver that pretty much any add-on card uses and the fact a lot of ATA commands are ignored and thus never relayed by the SCSI driver.

smartctl requires controller-specific syntax in order to address drives behind a SAS HBA or RAID controller properly. ive got it working with drives behind my areca controllers (smartctl -a -d areca,<disk#>/<enclosure#> /dev/arcmsr0), havent messed with any LSI controllers though.

HDSentinel also has some limited native support for some SAS HBA's and RAID controllers -- it may be able to "look through" the M1015's SCSI driver and communicate directly with the drives but I haven't tested.

Edit: You *should* be able to use the following command to see disks behind an M1015: smartctl -a -d sat /dev/sdd
 
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john4200

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Jan 1, 2011
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I had not realized that the state of the SAS HBA drivers and/or SCSI layer on Windows was so convoluted.

With linux, the drives connected through my M1015 HBA (mpt2sas driver) are accessed exactly the same as drives connected to motherboard SATA ports -- just /dev/sd_ , same as the others. You basically need to look in the kernel log (or /sys/devices/ ) to even tell that a particular /dev/sdx device is connected by HBA rather than motherboard SATA.

I wonder what prevents Windows from similar transparency. Is it the architecture of Windows? Or is it just that the people writing the HBA drivers for Windows don't bother? The former seems more likely...