Hi Pete!
...Glad you got PMsmartctl running although why it should need to be on an exception list of some sort I have no idea...
Oh, the need to toss your app into an exception list is not at all driven by the app itself. X-it is a handy little utility that tosses things like the little arrow up/down icon onto each and every window. That allows you to collapse a whole window into just the title bar. It has a pile of other things as well, such as folder freshes, sorting, etc. For that reason - since it interacts with each particular window - it may at times hit an app which does NOT like this. In such cases the said app may act weirdly, or not run at all. Well, in your case that's exactly what was hapenning. Once I tossed it onto the X-it list that prevented X-it from attempting to hi-jack your apps title bar.
...PMsmartctl simply shows whatever "smartctl --scan" finds. If the DVD shows as PATA then it is being reported as PATA by the smartctl output. My guess is a SATA DVD connected to a SATA controller port but using the PATA (danis506) driver could be the cause of that. In which case, for the purposes of both smartctl and the OS, it is considered a PATA drive...
Hmm, good point, so here is the 'smartctl --scan' output:
[G:\]smartctl --scan
ahci0 -d ata # ahci0, ATA device
hd0 -d ata # hd0, ATA device
ahci1 -d ata # ahci1, ATA device
ahci2 -d ata # ahci2, ATA device
You will note that the three hard-drive storage devices are all on a AHCI controller, while the DVD is on the IDE controller.
That means:
1) AHCI - supported by OS2AHCI driver
2) IDE - supported by DANIS506 driver
You are right though, based on what comes back here you simply can not tell what type of a device any of these are. This was a good reminder of what smartctl produces. I have a long time ago switched to running the monitoring through smartd (daemon mode) and logging all outputs to my NAS box.
But...looking further into smartctl I found the following: issuing the '--identify' parameter will in fact tell you whether a given device is an ATA (hard-drive storage) or ATAPI (device reader), following 'smartctl --identify hd0' gives:
smartctl 7.0 (build date Oct 19 2019) [i386-pc-os2-emx] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-18, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== ATA IDENTIFY DATA ===
Word Bit Value Description
0 - 0x85c0 General configuration
0 15 1 Device identifier: 0 = ATA, 1 = ATAPI
0 12:8 0x05 ATAPI: Command set: 0x05 = CD/DVD
0 7 1 Removable media device [OBS-8]
0 6:5 0x2 ATAPI: DRQ after PACKET cmd: 0x0 = 3ms, 0x2 = 50us
...
The following are two key pieces of info:
1)
0 15 1 Device identifier: 0 = ATA, 1 = ATAPI2)
0 7 1 Removable media device [OBS-8]Now...do you want to get into this level of pre-processing before your window comes up with the mapping of the devices into logical groupings though?...sure enough that app is quickly transforming into a storage device quasi-sysinfo type of a thing..but it would rock!!!
Also, the above is just a front end section, but further on at the very tail-end of the output you will find the following:
...
222 - 0x101f Transport major version number
222 15:12 0x1 Transport: 0x0 = Parallel, 0x1 = Serial, 0xe = PCIe
222 4 1 Reserved | SATA 2.6
222 3 1 Reserved | SATA 2.5
222 2 1 Reserved | SATA II: Extensions
222 1 1 ATA/ATAPI-7 | SATA 1.0a
222 0 1 ATA8-APT | ATA8-AST
...
And in this case you can actually tell whether it's a Parallel, Serial or even PCIe device.