Getting iPod hard drive SMART data via iPodLinux

Hard drives found in iPods generally support SMART. It is useful for checking drive health and running tests. The flash-based diagnostic mode reports only a few of the attributes. Rockbox lacks support for USB mass storage features which would allow programs running on a computer to use iPod hard drive SMART functions. I believe the original firmware's disk mode and the emergency disk mode in flash also lack this support.

Fortunately, there's iPodLinux. With some changes it's possible to cross-compile smartmontools for iPodLinux and run it there. Here's a link to the modified smartmontools-6.1 source with the smartctl binary inside. I did this quickly a while ago. I'm sure it's possible to port smartmontools more elegantly, but this works.

I find iPodLinux text input annoyingly inefficient, so I prepared three text files with these common commands:

smartctl -d ata -a /dev/hda > sao
smartctl -d ata -t long /dev/hda
smartctl -d ata -t short /dev/hda

You must specify -d ata to tell smartctl what type of interface to use. I'm sure it's possible to improve the port to remove that requirement.