SMART status unavailable for Samsung 870 EVO?

[Fallinangel]

Hi,

I recently bought a Samsung 870 EVO 2.5" SSD and put it in a LaCie Rugged enclosure, which previously featured a mechanical 2.5" hard-drive. I plan to move it into a RAID enclosure in the not so distant future. The LaCie Rugged enclosure gets connected via USB-C. It's probably a USB 3.0 connection (~250MB/s), since it's about 5 years old.

When I try to look at the SMART status of the connected SSD with "smartctl -a /dev/disk3s1", I get a "Operation not supported by device" error. smartctl is a command line tool for reading and monitoring SMART information of drives.

In System Information, I've noticed that the SDD doesn't seem to have a verified SMART status, like for instance the NVMe in my MacBook Pro or other external hard-drive.

What's happening here? Is the enclosure or SSD the culprit?

 

[dmdewey]

S.M.A.R.T. is for rotating mechanical drives. Apple does not recognize SMART status for SSDs (even though the manufacturer probably does). For more info, visit : https://mac-optimization.bestreviews.net/why-apple-drop-support-smart-status-late-2016-macbook-pros/

I imagine that Disk Utility will one day have the ability to check the drive health of external SSDs. It may even be a hidden feature that I'm unaware of.

 

[Fallinangel]

S.M.A.R.T. is for rotating mechanical drives.

No, it's a self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology for mechanical hard drives, SSDs, as well as eMMCs (cf. wikipedia, Samsung).

Apple does not recognize SMART status for SSDs (even though the manufacturer probably does).

Also not true, why else would my stock Apple solid state drive show a SMART status report when prompted with
smartctl and System Report show its SMART Status as verified.

I imagine that Disk Utility will one day have the ability to check the drive health of external SSDs.

That's were smartctl comes in to play.

 

[dmdewey]

Thanks for educating me. I am learning something new everyday.

 

[kschendel]

It's probably the enclosure. I don't have an 870 EVO, but I have a mess of other drives, some of them Samsung (970 Pro, 860, 980 Pro) and all of them respond with SMART status when connected directly to SATA or NVMe ports.

I have a Team Lite 3D SSD in an Orico USB-A enclosure that responds to smartctl, so at least some SATA-to-USB controllers can figure it out.

 

[Fallinangel]

It's probably the enclosure.

Yeah, that's my conclusion too so far. Thanks for your reply. I remember it being stated explicitly on Amazon that most Orico enclosures support SMART, which might be why it works for you.
I asked a friend of mine to see whether they can get a SMART status from their LaCie D2, which features a mechanical drive and is connected via USB 3.0 (standart-a type) connection. The result was the same, namely no reading.

Let's hope the RAID enclosure, I going to support it. It's nice to be able to monitor terabytes written for SSDs.

 

[rpmurray]

You need a special driver in order to read the SMART status of an external drive connected via USB. Do a search for "SAT SMART driver".

 

[Fallinangel]

You need a special driver in order to read the SMART status of an external drive connected via USB. Do a search for "SAT SMART driver".

Thank you very much that solved it! Much appreciated.

It's a bit finicky to get this going, so here's what I did!
I first got the SAT SMART driver from the Binary Fruit website (only the driver, not their app), instead of GitHub. The original driver from GitHub was an outdated build and couldn't be installed on Big Sur. Binary Fruit have an updated version. The driver itself is by the person from GitHub not them.
After that running smartctl -a /dev/disk*s* worked fine.
If it doesn't work for you, it's probably because Macs with the T2 chip, don't automatically load third-party drivers on start up. A simply fix is simply to unmount, unplug, and remount the external hard-drive, which forces the driver to be loaded.