ioctl's and USB drives

Sun Aug 7 10:51:19 UTC 2005

Hi,

I noticed hdparm doesn't work well on external USB drives. Try a hdparm
-I /dev/sda and see it fail with a "HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed:
Invalid argument". (I notice this on both a 2.4 and 2.6 kernel and with
hdparm-6.1.)

My question is whether this is a shortcoming in the usb-storage driver,
or because of some shortcoming in the firmware of the external drive
(case). Or is it because the usb-storage driver uses emulated SCSI and
this is why these commands fail?

I would like to get these commands to work so I can password protect
these drives with the new security commands introduced in hdparm.

Leonard.

-- 
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research