Health check of external hard drives

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You've already mentioned the use of the SMART features found in the Disks app, Tests & Data, and gsmartcontrol. A+

Another quick thing that you can do is to monitor /var/log/syslog* in terminal, like so...

grep -i sda /var/log/syslog*
  • change sda to your desired drive to search for
  • note the trailing * after syslog
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user208105
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user208105

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

  • user208105
    user208105 over 1 year

    What is best way to analyse the health of a large external 2TB/3TB/4TB USB hard drive with NTFS partitions in Ubuntu quickly?

    I want to get some diagnostic data on overall health of the hard drive without doing an in depth scan.

    So far I know gnome-disk-utility and gsmartcontrol.

    Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

    • guiverc
      guiverc over 5 years
      I'd use the smartctl or gnome-disks tools you have already mentioned; they read the health of the drive from the circuitry of the drive itself, and not file-system, thus do not care if the drive contains ntfs, ext, btrfs, xfs or any other file system. They also provide quick (historical stats only) so you can use without any scans.
    • sudodus
      sudodus over 5 years
      I think it is easiest to use Disks alias gnome-disks (part of the package gnome-disk-utility) which is normally installed by default with Ubuntu. See this link for more details, S.M.A.R.T. information of HDD and SSD
    • Terrance
      Terrance over 5 years
      smartctl can be very useful when checking drives. Best to check what smartmon tools supports when it comes to external USB drives: smartmontools.org/wiki/Supported_USB-Devices I did have to blacklist uas for my external USB drive so that even gnome-disks could run the smart checks on it.