[svlug] smartctl : strange behavior

[Lister]

All,
I have a Seagate expansion desktop drive. I use Debian 8.1 on my
desktop. In order to make the drive standby, I use smartctl.

[2011]$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Debian
Description:	Debian GNU/Linux 8.2 (jessie)
Release:	8.2
Codename:	jessie

[2006]$ lsusb  | grep Seagate
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0bc2:3320 Seagate RSS LLC SRD00F2 [Expansion
Desktop Drive]

[2010]$ sudo smartctl -s standby,now /dev/sde
smartctl 6.4 2014-10-07 r4002 [x86_64-linux-3.16.0-4-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

Device placed in STANDBY mode

Just to be sure about the smart drive database,

[2014]$ sudo update-smart-drivedb
/var/lib/smartmontools/drivedb/drivedb.h is already up to date

All good. No complaints here :-)

Now, I connect this drive to my desktop running ubuntu 15.04
[275]$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 15.04
Release:	15.04
Codename:	vivid

[278]$ lsusb  | grep -i seagate
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0bc2:3320 Seagate RSS LLC SRD00F2 [Expansion
Desktop Drive]

[279]$ sudo smartctl -a
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Seagate_Expansion_Desk_2HC015KJ-0\:0
smartctl 6.4 2014-10-07 r4002 [x86_64-linux-3.19.0-30-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

Read Device Identity failed: scsi error unsupported field in scsi command

A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more
'-T permissive' options.

[280]$ sudo update-smart-drivedb
/var/lib/smartmontools/drivedb/drivedb.h is already up to date

[287]$ dpkg -s  libatasmart4 | grep Ver
Version: 0.19-3

Please note that the version of both smart4 library (0.19-3)as well as
smartmontools (6.4) are same in both ubuntu and debian8.1. On both
machines, the smartctl data base is upto date.

How can the same verision binary (and library) produce such inconsistent
output is beyond my comprehension. I even tried re-booting a couple of
times. Any ideas? How can I proceed on ubuntu?

Thanks,
Om.