[smartmontools-support] SMART Attribute in Offset (386..510)

[Christian Franke]

Dear Jens,

Krüger, Jens wrote:
> Yes, storing SMART information in this area is really a very old way.

I'm not aware of any other device storing important information there.


> In my specific case, it is used for the new edition of a CF card, i.e. a P-ATA medium.
> Although these have completely disappeared from the consumer market, they are still used in industry.
>
> Attached you will find an excerpt from the CF data sheet (not under NDA), where the SMART structure is described.
> Also the output of "smartctl -a" from one of these CF cards.

Interestingly the device returns 12 attributes in the traditional format 
(introduced 1995 in SFF-8035i, removed from specs after T13 ATA-3 rev 7b 
from 1997) but the data sheet apparently only documents 2 bytes from 
Power_Cycle_Count raw value. It is a bad idea for a new device to 
provide the other interesting values like "Number of invalid block / run 
time bad block" in the other vendor specific block instead of the well 
known attribute block.

Do the bytes 386-406 actually match the specification?
Try 'smartctl -r ioctl,2 -A ...' for a hex dump.


> In this case from the 1GB version.
> Depending on the capacity, the "Device Model:" changes.
> If there is currently no way to output this offset range, it would be fantastic if this were possible in a future version.

Due to the long backlog of pending vendor specific drive database 
additions, it is currently not planned to add support for this other 
vendor specific block, sorry.

We possibly could add this block as a byte array to 'smartctl -j' output 
such that external tools could interpret it.

-- 
Regards,
Christian