With an external drive the SMART info might be hidden behind the USB-to-SATA bridge, smartctl has support for some of those but sometimes needs to be told with an extra argument.
The Seagate Expansion is made as an external drive by Seagate itself, so it was not put in some random enclosure.
If Seagate has chosen in 2025 to use some archaic bridge that does not pass the SMART commands, it is on them. That would be even more stupid than not implementing SMART in the HDD firmware.
As I have said, the previous external Seagate that I had bought in 2024 had SMART that worked fine over USB. I have a large number of external HDDs, most from WD. Some have been packaged by the HDD vendor as USB drives, others I have assembled myself into enclosures with SATA-to-USB bridges.
On all of them SMART works perfectly, except in this Seagate Expansion Desktop, where the drive replies that SMART is not supported.
Whenever I buy a HDD, I first run the long SMART self-test, to determine whether it can be used safely or I should return it immediately, even if the long self-test takes a couple of days on modern over 20 TB HDDs.
I started to use this procedure after I had some problems with a batch of WD drives, 2 decades ago, where all the drives had very frequent errors since the first few days of use. After running the SMART self-tests, which all failed, the seller could not deny an immediate replacement.
You know, there are external drive USB controllers that linux blocks/blacklists SMART passthrough when using UAS due to paranoia and historical problems, but this can overridden.
I guess it is possible this is not your problem, but the last Seagate external I bought in October worked just fine with this workaround. This is probably safe from a data integrity standpoint, at least with a modern filesystem, but in my case it was no issue as I was only using the SMART to do tests before shucking the drive. Also, I don't know of any modern drive that truly doesn't support SMART.
adrian_b|15 days ago
If Seagate has chosen in 2025 to use some archaic bridge that does not pass the SMART commands, it is on them. That would be even more stupid than not implementing SMART in the HDD firmware.
As I have said, the previous external Seagate that I had bought in 2024 had SMART that worked fine over USB. I have a large number of external HDDs, most from WD. Some have been packaged by the HDD vendor as USB drives, others I have assembled myself into enclosures with SATA-to-USB bridges.
On all of them SMART works perfectly, except in this Seagate Expansion Desktop, where the drive replies that SMART is not supported.
Whenever I buy a HDD, I first run the long SMART self-test, to determine whether it can be used safely or I should return it immediately, even if the long self-test takes a couple of days on modern over 20 TB HDDs.
I started to use this procedure after I had some problems with a batch of WD drives, 2 decades ago, where all the drives had very frequent errors since the first few days of use. After running the SMART self-tests, which all failed, the seller could not deny an immediate replacement.
epcoa|15 days ago
https://www.mcgarrah.org/usb-drive-smart/
I guess it is possible this is not your problem, but the last Seagate external I bought in October worked just fine with this workaround. This is probably safe from a data integrity standpoint, at least with a modern filesystem, but in my case it was no issue as I was only using the SMART to do tests before shucking the drive. Also, I don't know of any modern drive that truly doesn't support SMART.