(中文版請見後一篇)

Recently, I added two SATA 1TB hard drives into the SVN server of my team. For inventory control, the model number and the serial number of new hardware must be reported. As an IT guy, I won’t bother to remove the chassis, unplug the HD and then check the S/N. So I was trying to look for way to obtain the device information as easy as possible…

Introduction
As a counterpart of hdparm in Linux; there is camcontrol (8) in FreeBSD, but it’s not what we need here. For ATA devices, we are talking about atacontrol (8).

HOWTO
You may directly type the command without any parameter, then a simple directions will be shown. (It’s skipped here.)
Running with ``list'' parameter, it will show ATA devices currently available. The result is excerpted as follows.

netsec-svn# atacontrol list
ATA channel 3:
    Master:  ad6 <WDC WD5002ABYS-01B1B0/02.03B02> SATA revision 2.x
    Slave:       no device present
ATA channel 4:
    Master: acd0 <ASUS DRW-22B1ST/1.00> SATA revision 1.x
    Slave:       no device present
ATA channel 5:
    Master: ad10 <ST31000528AS/CC35> SATA revision 2.x
    Slave:       no device present
ATA channel 6:
    Master: ad12 <ST31000528AS/CC35> SATA revision 2.x
    Slave:       no device present
netsec-svn#

As a result, now we know the newly installed HD are attached on ATA channel 5 and 6; the device name are ad10 and ad12, separately.
Then, we can use the ``cap'' parameter to get detail information.

netsec-svn# atacontrol cap ad10

Protocol              SATA revision 2.x
device model          ST31000528AS
serial number         5VP1XXXX
firmware revision     CC35
cylinders             16383
heads                 16
sectors/track         63
lba supported         268435455 sectors
lba48 supported       1953525168 sectors
dma supported
overlap not supported

Feature                      Support  Enable    Value           Vendor
write cache                    yes      yes
read ahead                     yes      yes
Native Command Queuing (NCQ)   yes       -      31/0x1F
Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ)   no       no      31/0x1F
SMART                          yes      yes
microcode download             yes      yes
security                       yes      no
power management               yes      yes
advanced power management      no       no      0/0x00
automatic acoustic management  yes      yes     0/0x00  254/0xFE
netsec-svn#

Now, not only the M/N and S/N, all the ATA-releated information are clearly listed, e.g. CHS definition and DMA support.

Reference
FreeBSD Man Page: atacontrol (8)