openSeaChest

openSeaChest

Cross platform storage device utilities to manage, configure, and read health information for SATA, SAS, NVMe, and USB attached HDDs and SSDs.

Copyright © 2014-2026 Seagate Technology LLC and/or its Affiliates, All Rights Reserved

Welcome to the openSeaChest open source project!

openSeaChest is a collection of comprehensive, easy-to-use command line diagnostic tools and programming libraries for storage devices that help you quickly determine the health and status of your storage product. The collection includes several tests that show device information, properties and settings. It includes several tests which may modify the storage product such as power management features or firmware download. It includes various commands to examine the physical media on your storage device. Close to 200 commands and sub-commands are available in the various openSeaChest utilities. These are described in more detail below.

Here is an overview presentation we gave at the Storage Networking Industry Association - Storage Developer Conference 2018 that describes the design architecture for the opensea API and openSeaChest storage resource management utilities:

(Note: The openSeaChest team has the utmost respect for the highly regarded sg3_utils, hdparm, sdparm and nvme-cli open source projects. Since this is all pretty low-level stuff, we chose the presentation title “What’s better than sg3_utils, hdparm, sdparm?” only to grab the attention of a few extra people attending the SNIA SDC 2018 conference.)

About openSeaChest Command Line Diagnostics

Seagate offers both graphical user interface (GUI) and command line interface (CLI) diagnostic tools for our storage devices. SeaTools for end users is the most popular GUI tools These tools support 15 languages.

openSeaChest diagnostics are command line utilities which are available for expert users. These command line tools assume the user is knowledgeable about running software from the operating system command prompt. CLI tools are in the English language only and use “command line arguments” to define the various tasks and specific devices. openSeaChest diagnostics are available for both Linux and Windows environments.

Linux versions of openSeaChest tools are available as stand alone 32 or 64-bit executables you can copy to your own system. Windows OS versions of openSeaChest diagnostics are also available.

Technical Support for openSeaChest drive utilities is not available. If you have the time to send us some feedback about this software, especially if you notice something we should fix or improve, we would greatly appreciate hearing from you. To report your comments and suggestions, please use the issue reporting feature available in this git repository. Additionally, you can contact us through this email address seaboard @ seagate.com. Please let us know the name and version of the tool you are using.

openSeaChest drive utilities support SATA, SAS, NVMe and USB interface devices. In some cases openSeaChest has successfully recognized PATA and SCSI legacy devices, although the software is not expected to do so.

For a description of all of our tools please see our Wiki. This pages also includes some instructions for those who are new to command line tools to help get you started!

Important Notes

If this is your drive, you should always keep a current backup of your important data.

Many tests and commands are completely data safe, while others will change the drive (like firmware download or data erasure or setting the maximum capacity, etc). Be careful using openSeaChest because some of the features, like the data erasure options, will cause data loss. Some commands, like setting the maximum LBA, may cause existing data on the drive to become inaccessible. Some commands, like disabling the read look ahead buffer, may affect the performance of the drive. Seagate is not responsible for lost user data.

Important note: Many tests in this tool directly reference storage device data sectors, also known as Logical Block Addresses (LBA). Test arguments may require a starting LBA or an LBA range. The predefined variable ‘maxLBA’ refers to the last sector on the drive. Many older SATA and SAS storage controllers (also known as Host Bus Adapters [HBA]) have a maximum addressable limit of 4294967295 [FFFFh] LBAs hard wired into their design. This equates to 2.1TB using 512 byte sectors. This also means accessing an LBA beyond the 2.1TB limitation either will result in an error or simply the last readable LBA (usually LBA 4294967295 [FFFFh]) depending on the actual hardware. This limitation can have important consequences. For example, if you intended to erase a 4TB drive, then only the first 2TB will actually get erased (or maybe even twice!) and the last 2TB will remain untouched. You should carefully evaluate your system hardware to understand if your storage controllers provide support for greater than 2.1TB.

Note: One gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes when referring to hard drive capacity. This software may use information provided by the operating system to display capacity and volume size. The Windows file system uses a binary calculation for gibibyte or GiB (2^30) which causes the abbreviated size to appear smaller. The total number of bytes on a disk drive divided by the decimal calculation for gigabyte or GB (10^9) shows the expected abbreviated size. See this FAQ for more information http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/172191en?language=en_US.

Binary Availability

BINARIES and SOURCE CODE files of the openSeaChest open source project have been made available to you under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0). The openSeaChest project repository is maintained at https://github.com/Seagate/openSeaChest.

Compiled binary versions of the openSeaChest utilities for various operating systems may be found at openSeaChest Releases.

This collection of storage device utility software is branched (forked) off of an original utility collection called the Seagate SeaChest Utilities by Seagate Technology LLC. The original SeaChest Utilities are still available at www.seagate.com or https://github.com/Seagate/ToolBin/tree/master/SeaChest. Binary versions are available for Linux or Windows, with the Windows versions signed by Seagate Technology LLC.

For details on what is different between openSeaChest and SeaChest, see this wiki page.

Repository Availability

With help from various community members across distributions, openSeaChest may be available from within your package manager.

Please be aware this list may not be complete. Seagate is happy to work with community members to help make openSeaChest available in other package repositories as well. Please reach out through an issue and we will do our best to help make it more available when possible.

The libraries

opensea-common - Operating System common operations, not specific to storage standards. Contains functions and defines that are useful to all other libraries.

opensea-transport - Contains standard ATA/SCSI/NVMe functions based on open standards for these command sets. This layer also supports different transporting these commands through operating systems to the storage devices. Code depends on opensea-common.

opensea-operations - Contains common use cases for operations to be performed on a storage device. This layer encapsulates the nuances of each command set (ATA/SCSI) and operating systems (Linux/Windows etc.) Depends on opensea-common and opensea-transport.

Source

Depending on your git version & client you can use either of the following two commands to clone the repository.

git clone --recurse-submodules -j8 https://github.com/Seagate/openSeaChest.git

or

git clone --recursive https://github.com/Seagate/openSeaChest.git

Note that cloning recursively is important as it clones all the necessary submodules.

See BUILDING.md for more information about how to use git.

Source Compatibility with various OSs

OpenSeaChest strives to be made available on any platform and any processor. Support for platforms has been added upon request from customers and issues that are created on this repository. The following tables illustrate platform support that exists today, at least in source code form, and contains notes about other platforms that are not currently supported, but may be possible to support. The list may not be complete. Feel free to request other OS support as well, but it may require more research or development in order to support. Please create an issue to request support for these other platforms when you need it!

SAS/SATA Compatibility

OS	Supported?	Notes
Windows	Yes	Windows vista and higher are supported
Linux	Yes	libATA blocks ATA security commands be default. Can add kernel parameter to disable this block. Only SG_IO IOCTL support implemented for version 3 today. HDIO support is not available. Should work on any 2.6 and later kernel. Earlier kernels may work too, but has not been tested.
FreeBSD	Yes	No known limitations at this time
DragonFlyBSD	Yes	More or less same capabilities as FreeBSD. Notable difference is that DragonflyBSD uses a SAT translator for ATA devices rather than CAM ATA support. This may or may not limit capabilities.
UEFI Shell	Yes, but not currently maintained	While source code support is largely maintained for UEFI, it has not been updated or built due to many significant limitations on shipping systems. Some do not include the ATA driver that can respond to passthrough requests, only a block driver is available to allow booting the system. We are happy to revive this and find a way to add CI for this upon request.
Solaris	Yes	This column is for the Oracle release of Solaris. USCSI ioctl support is implemented for passthrough support. No known limitations at this time.
Illumos	Yes	This column is for Illumos based distributions/openSolaris. Uses same USCSI ioctl as Solaris. No known limitations at this time.
AIX	Yes	Support for SATA and SAS is available. Code was tested on version 7.1, but may work on earlier versions. Some flags may need adjusting for earlier systems. Build was completed using GCC available in AIX toolkit with gmake. Only rhdisk handles are supported. pdisk support is not known since IBM does not appear to provide information on passing requests through RAID with what is normally available.
ESXI	Yes	Uses SG_IO v3 like Linux through compatibility layer. Requires complicated build system with special GCC build/VM from VMWare and some other development packges installed to compile.
NetBSD	Yes	ATA Passthrough limited to 28bit commands only due to kernel IOCTL limitations.
OpenBSD	Yes	ATA Passthrough limited to 28bit commands only due to kernel IOCTL limitations.
HP-UX	Partially	Code has been implemented to support HP-UX’s SCSI passthrough but it is untested.

NVMe Compatibility

OS	Supported?	Notes
Windows 10 & later	Yes	Microsoft driver has many limitations, but many are documented online. Sometimes need to use SCSI translation.
Windows 8.1	Limited	Mostly limited to SCSI translation except for FW update.
Windows 7	Limited	Entirely limited to SCSI translation
Windows openFabrics compatible driver	Yes	Supported, but may be limited to what commands are allowed by the driver (at least in latest openSource code). Some vendor’s NVMe drivers reuse the IOCTL for passthrough from this driver and may be supported.
Linux	Yes	Using built-in kernel driver and IOCTLs
FreeBSD	Yes
DragonflyBSD	Maybe	No NVMe in CAM at time of writing. Unknown if IOCTL is available. It will automatically enable during build time if it matches FreeBSD’s NVMe IOCTL that was first available prior to CAM NVMe support.
UEFI Shell	Yes, but not currently maintained	While source code support is largely maintained for UEFI, it has not been updated or built due to many significant limitations on shipping systems. Some systems do not include an NVMe driver that can respond to passthrough requests, only a block driver is available to allow booting the system. We are happy to revive this and find a way to add CI for this upon request.
Solaris	No, but possible	This column is for the Oracle release of Solaris. Possible to support NVMe through UNVME ioctl.
Illumos	No, but possible	Been a while since last looked at, but appeared limited in what commands were available.
AIX	Yes, untested	Implemented according to header from AIX 7.2, but support has not been tested
ESXI	Yes	Requires complicated build system with special GCC build/VM from VMWare and some other development packges installed to compile.
NetBSD	No, but possible
OpenBSD	No, but possible
HP-UX	No	Could not find any documentation about NVMe support in HP-UX

Building

See BUILDING.md for information on how to build the openSeaChest tools on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris/Illumos.

Contributions & Issues

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more information on contributions that will be accepted. This document also describes how to create an issue, generate a pull request, and licenses that will be accepted.

Security policy

See SECURITY.md for information on Seagate’s security policy for details on how to report security vulnerabilities.

Names, Logos, and Brands

All product names, logos, and brands are property of their respective owners. All company, product and service names mentioned in the source code are for clarification purposes only. Use of these names, logos, and brands does not imply endorsement.

Support and Open Source Statement

Support from Seagate Technology for open source projects is different than traditional Technical Support. If possible, please use the Issues tab in the individual software projects so that others may benefit from the questions and answers. Include the output of --version information in the message. See the user guide section ‘General Usage Hints’ for information about saving output to a log file.

If you need to contact us through email, please choose one of these two email addresses:

• [email protected] for general questions and bug reports
• [email protected] for specific questions about programming and building the software

Seagate offers technical support for drive installation. If you have any questions related to Seagate products and technologies, feel free to submit your request on our web site. See the web site for a list of world-wide telephone numbers.

• http://www.seagate.com/support-home/
• Contact Us: http://www.seagate.com/contacts/

This software uses open source packages obtained with permission from the relevant parties. For a complete list of open source components, sources and licenses, please see our Linux USB Boot Maker Utility FAQ for additional information.

The newest online version of the openSeaChest Utilities documentation, open source usage and acknowledgement licenses, and our Linux USB Boot Maker FAQ can be found at: https://github.com/Seagate/openSeaChest.

Copyright © 2014-2025 Seagate Technology LLC and/or its Affiliates, All Rights Reserved

License

BINARIES and SOURCE CODE files of the openSeaChest open source project have been made available to you under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL). Mozilla is the custodian of the Mozilla Public License (“MPL”), an open source/free software license.

The license can be views at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/ or LICENSE.md