How To Find Hard Disk SATA Link Speed On FreeBSD

To find the SATA link speed of a hard disk on a FreeBSD system, you can use the smartctl utility, which is part of the smartmontools package. smartctl allows you to view various attributes of a hard disk, including its SATA link speed.

To use smartctl to view the SATA link speed of a hard disk, follow these steps:

1. Install the smartmontools package on your FreeBSD system if it is not already installed. You can install it using the pkg package manager:

# pkg install smartmontools

2. Determine the device name of the hard disk you want to check. You can use the dmesg command to view the system log and find the device name of the hard disk. Look for a line that says something like "da0 at ahcisata0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0" or "ada0 at ahcisata0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0", where "da0" or "ada0" is the device name of the hard disk.

3. Use the smartctl command to view the SATA link speed of the hard disk. The syntax for this command is:

smartctl -a /dev/device-name

Replace device-name with the device name of the hard disk you determined in step 2. For example, if the device name of the hard disk is da0, you would use the following command:

smartctl -a /dev/da0

4. Look for the SATA Version is field in the output of the smartctl command. This field will show the SATA version and link speed of the hard disk.

Here is an example of the output you might see when running smartctl -a /dev/da0:

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 (AF)
Device Model:     ST4000DM000-1F2168
Serial Number:    Z1F0Z0G5
Firmware Version: CC47
User Capacity:    4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Form Factor:      3.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Fri Dec 10 14:38:16 2021 CET
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

In this example, the SATA link speed of the hard disk is 6.0 Gb/s.

For more information about using smartctl to view the attributes of a hard disk, you can refer to the smartctl man page by running man smartctl on the command line, or consult the smartmontools documentation online.