Using hdparm to enable diabled features of a hard drive

[Gordan Bobic]

Apologies for necroposting, but I've been looking for a similar feature 
and the lack of it annoyed me sufficiently that I wrote a patch to add 
the required functionality to hdparm.

Details here:
http://www.altechnative.net/?p=140

Patch here:
http://sourceforge.net/support/tracker.php?aid=3276513

Hopefully it'll get accepted into hdparm, but given the amount of spam I 
saw on the SF forums I rather doubt anyone is paying much attention 
there. Maybe I should open a Fedora bugzilla ticket instead...

 From what I can tell from my sample set, only Seagate disks seem to 
have this features; none of my Hitachi, Samsung, Western Digital or 
Toshiba disks have it, but all of my Seagates do.

HTH.

Gordan

--------------------------------------------------------


jd1008 at gmail.com wrote:
  When I issued
sudo hdparm -I /dev/hdb I got, among other info,
a list of commands/features, most of which are enabled,
except for a few. To wit:

Commands/features:
      Enabled    Supported:
         *    SMART feature set
              Security Mode feature set <<<<<<<
         *    Power Management feature set
         *    Write cache
         *    Look-ahead
         *    Host Protected Area feature set
         *    WRITE_BUFFER command
         *    READ_BUFFER command
         *    DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
              SET_MAX security extension <<<<<<<<<<<<
         *    Automatic Acoustic Management feature set
         *    48-bit Address feature set
         *    Device Configuration Overlay feature set
         *    Mandatory FLUSH_CACHE
         *    FLUSH_CACHE_EXT
         *    SMART error logging
         *    SMART self-test
         *    General Purpose Logging feature set
         *    WRITE_{DMA|MULTIPLE}_FUA_EXT
         *    64-bit World wide name
              Write-Read-Verify feature set <<<<<<<<<<
         *    WRITE_UNCORRECTABLE_EXT command
         *    {READ,WRITE}_DMA_EXT_GPL commands
         *    Segmented DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
         *    Gen1 signaling speed (1.5Gb/s)
         *    Gen2 signaling speed (3.0Gb/s)
         *    Native Command Queueing (NCQ)
         *    Phy event counters
              Device-initiated interface power management <<<<<<<<
         *    Software settings preservation
         *    SMART Command Transport (SCT) feature set
         *    SCT Long Sector Access (AC1)
         *    SCT LBA Segment Access (AC2)
         *    SCT Error Recovery Control (AC3)
         *    SCT Features Control (AC4)
         *    SCT Data Tables (AC5)
              unknown 206[12] (vendor specific)

So, my questions are:

a.  how can I use hdparm to enable write/read verify? That's what I am
interested in.
       Man page does not mention this.