Comment 7 for bug 1581594

Sorry for the late reply Martin... my bugs mailbox has gotten quite backed up. I emailed smartmontols-devel about the issue and their response was:

There likely was some historic HDD which used attribute 231 for temperature (same for 9 and 220).

And yes, there are devices which report temperature in more than one attribute.

They went on to say they would probably change smartmontools to prefer the more common attribute and I thought that libatasmart should follow suit.

Will create the upstream bug report, though the last one or two I have created with patches attached have gone ignored there for years so...