hdd: instruments for querying ATA and SCSI disks

Documentation.

Why?

Mainly because I was disappointed in all the available options for putting SMART and SCSI log info into various monitoring systems.

• Scripts that parse smartctl output are just ugly, error prone hacks that still make me cringe.
• To add support for different, programming-friendly output formats into smartctl (e.g. JSON), one basically needs to rewrite a lot of ad-hoc printfs scattered all over the source files, and it's not much easier if you decide to drop the idea of implementing some command-line switch in favour of simply changing the output format altogether. (Things are only getting more complex with smartd.)
• libatasmart (and tools that it powers) can only work with ATA devices, and only on Linux, and expecting more from that library is simply naïve.

How?

Build sample smartctl-esque tool:

git clone https://github.com/vthriller/hdd-rs.git
cd smart-rs/cli
cargo build --release
sudo ./target/release/smart-rs -i --json /dev/sda

Then put this into your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
hdd = { git = "https://github.com/vthriller/hdd-rs" }

What's supported?

Platforms and transports:

• Linux: ATA¹, SCSI
• FreeBSD: ATA, SCSI

SCSI/ATA translation is also supported.

¹ Note that in Linux, ATA is only supported through SAT, although SG_IO kindly emulates that for SATA (and, possibly, PATA?) disks for us.

Features:

• TODO

To Do

• Documentation.
• Tests.
• More tests.
• Even more tests: big-endian systems, old hardware…
• Feature parity with [insert your favourite package name here].
• Support for RAID weirdos (LSI, Adaptec, Areca, you name it) and USB bridges.
• Debugging options (think smartctl -r ataioctl,2 or skdump) for CLI tool.

License

This crate is distributed under the terms of Mozilla Public License version 2.0.