How can I get the BSD name of a USB disk from its serial number in the terminal?

Put the following shell function in your ~/.zshenv file which won't exist until you create it:

function dfdevice () {
    # skip df headings and last line
    df | awk '$0 ~ /map/ {getline}{printf "%-35s%-25s\n", fields[NF],fields[1]}{split($0, fields, FS)}'
}

Once you have saved the ~/.zshenv file, make that function available. Subsequent Terminal launches will make it available by default:

source ~/.zshenv

and then run the function from the shell:

dfdevice

This will produce two columns of output:

1. path
2. device name (e.g. /dev/disk7s1)

I think I may have a possible solution. There is an app I use for monitoring my SSD writes but has a lot more to it than just that. The app is a command line app called "smartctl" which can extract more information than one could possibly want to know about any drive.

https://www.smartmontools.org/

I looked through the man pages and it looks like you could get what you want. You may need to recurse through disk0, disk1, etc. to get what you want.

When I run the basic command to get the info I want about drive usage I get this (disk5 in this case). Note the -a parameter collects all info available via SMART:

smartctl -a disk5

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===

Model Number:                       OWC Aura Ultra IV

Serial Number:                      xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Firmware Version:                   EIFM70.3

PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID:            0x1987

IEEE OUI Identifier:                0x6479a7

Total NVM Capacity:                 1,000,204,886,016 [1.00 TB]

Unallocated NVM Capacity:           0

plus alot more after this.

There are parameters that you can set to limit the output and as I recall from a quick scan of the man page serial number may be one.

Also, I think you need to install another extension in order to access USB drives as the Mac USB drivers do not have the capability of retrieving SMART data from USB drives.

I think this may at least be a start in the right direction.

woodmeister50 wrote:

I think I may have a possible solution. There is an app I use for monitoring my SSD writes but has a lot more to it than just that. The app is a command line app called "smartctl" which can extract more information than one could possibly want to know about any drive.

https://www.smartmontools.org/

I was thinking of this as well. However, as I was looking to see if macOS still had the information, I found that the serial number which macOS does retrieve with "ioreg" was for the adapter for my SSD & not the SSD itself. That got me to thinking the OP may actually need to adapter/enclosure serial number as opposed to the serial of the physical internal drive itself.

However, to limit the information provided by "smarctl", you would want to use the " -i " or " --info " option which will just pull the drive's physical information such as Make, Model, Serial, Firmware, etc.

Also, for external USB drives, the OP would need to install a special USB driver in order to allow "smartctl" to attempt to access the drive's SMART details.

You can use the following to get the drive name and serial number. It will require some post-processing and creative time to filter just the information you want:

ioreg -p IOUSB -l -b | egrep -io '("USB Product Name"|"USB Serial Number") = \"[[:alnum:]|[:alpha:] ]+\"'

Continuing to revise the ioreg output, I now appear to be able to get the actual NVME drive serial number instead of the drive housing, and the product name. This also includes the internal Apple SSD details — all in column output.

# list NVME drive product names first then their serial number. Exactly opposite of awk output.
ioreg -rd1 -w0 -c IONVMeBlockStorageDevice | grep "Device Characteristics" | \
    awk -F'[=,]' '{sub(/^[[:blank:]]*{/,"", $2); sub(/^[[:blank:]]*{/,"", $6);
                   printf "%-25s%-25s\n%-25s%-25s\n", $2, $3, $6, $7}' | \
                   tr -d '"' | tac

Getting SMART data on USB drives can be hit or miss depending on the USB to SATA (or USB to PCI in the case of NVMe) depending on the specific chip set that is used and whether it supports tunneling or not.

👍‼️

Post processing by piping it to: awk '!/Hub|HUB/' which will give you product name and serial number pairs.