Smartmontools should work correctly with SATA drives under both Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. Depending on which subsystem the SATA controller is in (i.e. drivers/ide, drivers/ata or libata (under drivers/scsi) a SATA drive will appear as /dev/hd* or /dev/sd*. Either way, smartmontools should be able to figure out what is going on and act accordingly. In some cases smartmontools may need a hint in the form of a '-d sat' or '-d ata' option on the smartctl command line or in the /etc/smartd.conf file. There may be a hint to add one of those options in the log file when smartd is run as a daemon or on the command line with smartctl. The '-d ata' option means that even though the drive has a SCSI device name, treat it as an ATA disk. Unfortunately such an approach doesn't often work. The next paragraph has more information about '-d sat'.

The SCSI to ATA Translation (SAT) standard (ANSI INCITS 431-2007) may solve many problems in this area. It defines how SCSI commands will be translated to the corresponding ATA commands and defines a pass-through mechanism. ATA commands are conveyed natively by two transports: parallel and serial ATA. SCSI commands can be conveyed by many transports: the veteran SCSI Parallel Interface (SPI), Fibre Channel (FC), Infiniband (SRP), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), IP (iSCSI and iSER), USB (mass storage), and IEEE 1394 (SBP) to name some. Due to their cost and storage capacity, more and more ATA disks (especially SATA disks) are appearing "behind" a SCSI transport. This is especially true of the SAS transport which can painlessly accomodate both SAS and SATA disks. Enter another acronym: SATL which stands for SCSI to ATA Translation Layer. In Linux libata has a SATL in it. Some SAS host bus adapters have a SATL in their firmware. FC might have a SATL in a switch. Perhaps in the future USB and IEEE 1394 enclosures will have a SATL in them. Starting from smartmontools versions 5.36 and 5.37, no matter where a SATL is, irrespective of the operating system in use, the user should have less problems with ATA disks, no matter which transport is involved. As always, it helps to know a little of what is happening under the covers. The '-d sat' option instructs smartctl and smartd to assume a SATL is in place and act accordingly. The smartctl command can often detect a SATL and autoconfigure while in smartmontools version 5.37 smartd often needs a hint.