When attempting to check the health of a hard drive behind a Dell PERC (PowerEdge RAID Controller) or MegaRAID controller using smartctl , you may encounter the following error:
When disks are connected through such a controller, the Linux kernel does not see the individual physical drives. Instead, it only sees the , the RAID volume presented as /dev/sda , /dev/sdb , etc. When you run smartctl -i /dev/sda , the command is essentially trying to query that virtual drive, which doesn't have a SMART interface to report, triggering the error: When attempting to check the health of a
If you are writing a script or noting this down for future reference, the clear syntax is: Use MegaCLI / StorCLI (Dell Recommended): Fixing the
to see a list of detected drives and their corresponding IDs. Use MegaCLI / StorCLI (Dell Recommended): it only sees the
Fixing the "smartctl open device /dev/sda failed: DELL or MegaRAID controller" Error