On Nov 27, 2012 7:34 AM, "Ralf Corsepius" <rc040203(a)freenet.de> wrote:
(snip)
2. dmesg reports this (Here: Fedora 16):
[ 26.904380] ata_id[762]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/sdb':
Invalid argument
Many - most? - USB to SATA bridge chips don't pass through these kind of
requests. I suspect you would find that both hdparm and smartctl displaying
similar results. This can make life interesting. For example, the drive
could have exhausted the reserve of reallocateable sectors, leaving the OS
to write bits on dead sectors and suffer transparent corruption. The OS
wouldn't know because it can't see the SMART values.
I'm not suggesting that symptomatic drive failure is necessarily involved
with your described issue, but I *do* fsck far more often when smartd can't
keep an eye on things for me.
--Pete