[smartmontools-support] is the FAQ up-to-date regarding USB/Firewire/SATA support?

[Gary F. <ga...@in...>]

At http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/#testinghelp, the FAQ says
the following:

FireWire, USB, and SATA disks/systems 
As for USB and FireWire (ieee1394) disks and tape drives, the news is not
good. They appear to Linux as SCSI devices but their implementations do not
usually support those SCSI commands needed by smartmontools. The ieee1394
consortium recently certified the first external enclosure (containing a ATA
disk and a protocol bridge) as being compliant to the relevant standards.
Such devices have already been on the market for about 3 years and they tend
to only support the bare minimum of commands needed for device operation
(i.e. SMART support is an unsupported extra).


Smartmontools should work correctly with SATA drives under both Linux 2.4
and 2.6 kernels, if you use the standard IDE drivers in drivers/ide. If you
use the new libata drivers, it won't work correctly because libata doesn't
yet support the needed ATA-passthrough ioctl() calls. Jeff Garzik, the
libata developer, says that this support will be added to libata in the
future. When this happens, we'll add support to smartmontools for a new
SATA/libata device type '-d sata'. Typically, to force an SATA disk to run
using the standard (non-libata) drivers, you must use the BIOS to select
"legacy mode" for the controller. If the IDE driver doesn't support your
particular SATA controller, or the controller doesn't have a legacy
interface, then only libata can be used. Unless the hard disk controller on
the system motherboard is Intel, VIA or nVidia, standard IDE drivers may not
work 

Note: an unofficial patch to libata that allows smartmontools to be used
with the standard '-d ata' device type was posted to the linux kernel
mailing list at the end of August 2004. The patch is included in the
libata-dev patchset that can be applied to a recent Linux kernel (>= 2.6.9).
With a SATA disk driven by a libata driver, smartmontools can now be used by
specifying both the device type 'ata' and the SCSI device corresponding to
this disk, for example, smartctl -i -d ata /dev/sda. The patch is still
under development and it is probably best to make sure that the disk is idle
before trying smartmontools.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Given the references to August 2004 above, I was wondering if the situation
with USB, Firewire, and SATA is still as stated above?  Also, was wondering
if the compliance/conformance situation is better now for Firewire ATA
bridges?  Can you name a few manufacturers and/or models of Firewire bridges
that are reasonbly conformant?  In particular, one of the things we'd
like to be able to do is to idenitfy an attached drive by its
manufacturer, model, and serial number (and capacity).  As mentioned,
it seems that many Firewire bridges don't seem to support a full
complement of commands.  So far, we don't seem to have a Firewire
bridge that properly support the "identify" command.

thanks for you help.