[smartmontools-support] I can't complete the long test

[Nathan Stratton Treadway]

On Fri, May 07, 2021 at 12:59:48 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> As Nathan said, it is the usb chipset which is the culprit, it is seen as
> the "host". I didn't realize this. The daemon doesn't influence things.

Well, to be precise, the smartd daemon's activity does help keep the
drive "awake" (and would do so even more if you removed the "n standby"
from the drive's line in smartd.conf).  

But because smartd only runs once every 30 minutes, even without -n
standby it's probably not frequent enough to keep the drive awake for
the duration of a full self-test (depending on the firmware timeout
setting).



> So, perhaps I have to run a cronjob simultaenously with smartd testing to
> force the disks to stay awake to be tested, or forget automated (long)
> testing and do it manually when I want, as anyway the testing takes almost a
> day.


Personally I don't attempt to use smartd to run long self-tests for
USB-connected drives and just do them manually from time to time (since
I don't leave them plugged in most of the time and so running a long
self-test also involves planing to leave it plugged in).

However, for what it's worth here's a link I found to a discussion about
setting the firmware inactivity timeout for a WD enclosure.  In this
thread setting the timeout from Linux didn't work, but the thread is 11
years old so maybe you can have better luck with your current
enclosures.
  https://community.wd.com/t/my-book-essential-2tb-going-into-stanby/497

(If you can get sgparm to update the timeout dynamically, you could
leave a normal default most of the time but disable the timeout during a
long self-test run...)

If you do investigate that, let us know how it goes.

							Nathan

p.s. This is unrelated to the timeout issue, but have you tried the
smartd.conf line without the "-T permissive" option? 

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