PS: DDx was unable to read S.M.A.R.T. on the SSD in my OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini enclosure, and according to what I"ve read, it's because it's only USB 3.0, so I'm wondering if that's a can't-get-around-it limitation or it can be circumvented?
I have three of those same enclosures and the limitation is the USB standard which does not provide for carrying S.M.A.R.T. data and so is not included in the USB bridge chips. Either Thunderbolt 2 or 3 provides for reporting S.M.A.R.T. in the standard.
PPS: Does DS offer functionality that TTP doesn't, i.e. why do you need both?
It depends on whether the drive itself uses an ATA (SATA or PATA) or NVMe attachment.
- With an ATA attached HDs or SSDs DS not only reports the drive's attributes but additionally in separate screens details about the drive itself, its capabilities, can trigger shut or long self-tests, and a log of previous self tests including SMART pass/fail.
- With NVMe drives DS only reports the NVMe data and SMART logs. I believe this is a limitation of the NBVMe standard.
Only the attributes are essential and those are reported by TTP and DriveX as well, but the other information could be informative, not to mention the ability to trigger a self test. By the way a Short self test on a 1TB 7200 rpm HD takes 2 minutes, the long test takes 3 hours and the drive will be off-line during the test. (Not sure how that works with the boot drive??)
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