"Mike Redrobe" wrote in message . uk
Folkert Rienstra wrote:
And he did say "many" are too simple to support SMART,
not that it is impossible, as in:
" SMART doesn't work on external drives..."

..which states it doesn't /currently/ work, not that it never will.
That's the situation for usb/firewire external drives /at present/.

Then maybe that is what you should have said in the first place.


Can you read SMART info from an external drive *today*?

No.

There you go again.
The fact that I can't prove that there is no bridge currently
that supports it, that is not then proof that it is nonexistent.

And as far as Firewire goes, I get the impression that the 1394 Tailgate
is much like SATA so it shouldn't be so difficult to provide a S.M.A.R.T.
driver for it.


Many of the external network drives use linux, so as someone
said, it might be currently possible to query SMART directly
on the unit for those.