Hm, FARM is Seagate-specific but the standard is open, neat. I'll add support for this to https://github.com/TkTech/smartie/. Introduction here, https://www.snia.org/educational-library/introduction-hdd-fi... and the Mozilla v2 licensed libraries from seagate under https://github.com/Seagate all seem to support FARM now.

how are they "more trustworthy"? after all, it's data on a flash on the drive board.

is it lack of tooling, as demonstrated by needing the last smartmontools version to even read them, or some protection in the firmware to prevent resetting them (hey, no legit business resetting the power-on hours to zero...).

I checked the recertified ironwolf 12TB drives I bought, and both SMART and FARM report times in line with when I installed them in my nas. Of course, since they're recertified by seagate themselves, they may very well have a backdoor to reset FARM.

Wow, this is great. I don't care about "more trustworthy", but this has so much more information than regular smart data.

Incredible. Even stuff like range of voltages on voltage rails that the drive has seen, etc. I'm proud of my power supply, looking at the data. :D

Seems to require smartmontools 7.4 (August 2023) which at least Debian isn't including yet (7.3).

Wasn't particularly concerned about mine, but thought it'd be fun to poke at.

There's a backport https://packages.debian.org/bookworm-backports/source/smartm...

Having to install a backport of a version released one and half years ago is wild.

It's not wild for people who choose to use a stable distribution that last released prior to smartmontools 7.4. It's exactly what they want and choose.

(Debian 12: 10 June 2023; smartmontools 7.4: 1 August 2023)

Favoring stability doesn't come without its drawbacks (nor without benefits).

Debian Testing might be more of your tempo if you don't like the age of packages in Stable

Only having to update once every couple of years is wild. And it’s also awesome.

That's really not a lot of time in the scheme of things.

Welcome to Debian. The newest stable release (bookworm) is from June 2023.

I hooked my new (arrived today) Seagate drive up to a computer running Linux, and installed the openSeaChest utility https://github.com/Seagate/openSeaChest_LogParser

But I don't see how to gain access to the whatever logs are buried in the drive's memory. The instructions for the utility don't provide any guidance on this. How does one actually extract logs from the drive?

I installed seagate_info (a separate part of SeaChest) and it pulls no stats at all from the drive.

The whole thing has been a non-trivial waste of time.

Anyone know how to check these drives on a Mac?

I have a new (?) 8TB Seagate drive out in front of my house right now, just delivered.

You might have success booting some Linux live image from USB. I had success with nixos 24.11 on a Mac Pro (Intel).

Thanks for the suggestion. I wiped my orphaned 2014 iMac and installed Mint on it, so I guess I should be good to go. I just didn't want to go under my desk to unplug my toaster dock and move it unless necessary.

If you have an ARM Mac and a USB enclosure for the drive, I had some success with smartmontools running in ARM Linux under VmWare. I also tried UTM (pretty much QEMU), but UTM's USB passthrough was not good enough.

Interesting. Thanks for that. I have the drive hooked up to a Mint computer running the openSeaChest utility, but that utility appears to only parse the logs. I can't find any way to extract the logs from the drive's memory. This is undocumented by the utility as far as I can tell.

I'm not 100% sure you can out of the box, the default driver on macOS is very restrictive in what commands can be passed through to the device.

Thanks for the reply. I have an old iMac running Mint, so I guess I'll start there with the openSeaChest utility.