The sdparm utility accesses SCSI device parameters. When the SCSI device is a disk, sdparm’s role is similar to its namesake: the Linux hdparm utility which is primarily designed for ATA disks that had device names starting with “hd”. More generally sdparm can be used to access parameters on any device that uses a SCSI command set. Apart from SCSI disks, such devices include CD/DVD drives (irrespective of transport), SCSI and ATAPI tape drives and SCSI enclosures.
A small set of commands associated with starting and stopping the media, loading and unloading removable media and some other housekeeping functions can also be sent with this utility.
This utility currently contains over 500 entries spread across generic mode pages, transport specific mode pages, vendor specific mode pages, Vital Product Data (VPD) pages and their fields. Rather than try and document all of these here (or in the man page), another approach is taken. This utility’s internal tables can be searched and output with the ‘–enumerate’ option. Additional explanatory information is output when the ‘–long’ option is used (and still more if the ‘–long’ option is used twice).
Website: sg.danny.cz/sg/sdparm.html
Support:
Developer: Douglas Gilbert
License: FreeBSD
sdparm is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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| hdparm | Tune hard disk parameters for high performance |
| sg3_utils | Utilities that send SCSI commands to devices |
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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