[smartmontools-support] smartd vs. smartctl: Fusion MPT SAS/SATA RAID controller and physical disks (/dev/sg*)

[Wolfram S. <li...@wo...>]

Hi!

I have 2 Seagate ST3250620NS SATA disks connected to a Dell SAS6/iR
SAS/SATA RAID controller. The Fusion MPT controller driver hands the
physical disks over to Linux as SCSI generic (not disk) devices
(/dev/sg1 and /dev/sg2).

smartctl -d sat -a /dev/sg1 works fine and shows all the information,
whereas smartd (with '/dev/sg1 -d sat -a' in smartd.conf) says this:
--8<--
daemon.info; smartd[25129]: smartd version 5.37 [x86_64-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
daemon.info; smartd[25129]: Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
daemon.info; smartd[25129]: Opened configuration file /etc/smartd.conf
daemon.info; smartd[25129]: Configuration file /etc/smartd.conf parsed.
daemon.info; smartd[25129]: Device: /dev/sg1, opened
daemon.info; smartd[25129]: Device: /dev/sg1, not found in smartd database.
daemon.info; smartd[25129]: Device: /dev/sg1, is SMART capable. Adding to "monitor" list.
daemon.info; smartd[25129]: Monitoring 1 ATA and 0 SCSI devices
daemon.info; smartd[25129]: Device: /dev/sg1, not capable of SMART self-check
daemon.crit; smartd[25129]: Device: /dev/sg1, failed to read SMART Attribute Data
daemon.info; smartd[25129]: Device: /dev/sg1, Read SMART Self Test Log Failed
daemon.info; smartd[25129]: Device: /dev/sg1, Read SMART Error Log Failed
daemon.info; smartd[25131]: smartd has fork()ed into background mode. New PID=25131.
daemon.info; smartd[25131]: file /var/run/smartd.pid written containing PID 25131
--8<--

What could be the reason for smartd and smartctl behaving different?!

TIA.
-- 
Regards,
Wolfram Schlich <wsc...@ge...>
Gentoo Linux * http://dev.gentoo.org/~wschlich/