How do I check external USB Drive health?

Question

I tried a few utils and none of them worked. Either USB wasnt supported or the drive was 'recognized'. I am trying to figure out if i should dump the drive or not. Its only a year old but the warranty is only a year which is a pity.

Solution 1

Another alternative would be CrystalDiskInfo You can download the portable version so you can test without installing.

Solution 2

Most tools have trouble passing the SMART status of hard drives over USB.

Your best bet for getting the health status from the drive over USB from a generic tool is smartctl from smartmontools. A version that works on Windows with a nice GUI is available here. If this does not work, you will have to download and install the device specific management tool from the manufacturer. The management tool will have a health checker for the drive. Here is the site for western digital. Here is the site for Seagate. You could also take out the drive from the external enclosure and hook it up to your PC directly using SATA or IDE and then read the status using standard tools like HDTune or Smartctl.

smartctl support for USB is described in more detail here.

Solution 3

Give HDDScan a try. It does SMART value reporting from ATA/SATA/USB/FireWire and analyzes log pages from SCSI drives. It can also perform SMART tests on hard drives connected by any of the above-mentioned interfaces.

Solution 4

I use HD Tune Pro (Windows, $34.95 but free trial):

Also, there is Virtual Console USB Flash Drive Tester (mirror) (Windows, free):

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Comments

[Admin]

Never take out the WD (e.g. MyBook) HDD from the enclosure and try to mount it internally unless you like to repair unallocated partitions. I have tried it personally.

[Brent Bradburn]

I think this question does a pretty good job on: "describe your situation and the specific problem you're trying to solve." What appears to be missing from the question, making it off-topic, is an open-ended "how do I do this?" at the end.

[Tom Hale]

What's wrong with asking about how to perform a specific task?

[Hey]

Closing this question is stupid. Almost any question on this site can be solved by recommending a product, that doesn't mean that the OP was necessarily asking for a product recommendation.

[SharpC]

I tried all the tools listed and couldn't get anything to read over USB. However Kaspersky Security Cloud immediately detected the drive (More Tools → Data Protection → Hard Drive Health Monitor → Details) and I was able to get all the normal SMART params over USB. I would have loved to have added this as an answer, but all the good questions on Stack Exchange stupidly always get closed as off-topic!!

[Ahmed Hamdy]

It can't read the SMART values for the external hard.

[Tom Hale]

This doesn't require installation as a bonus

[ivan_pozdeev]

Spinrite has bad reputation. To summarize, what it claims to be doing either doesn't make sense to do or is outright impossible.

[Kanchu]

The first link (HDD Guardian) is no longer available...

[Jared Chu]

It can't detect my USB drive

[Chris Woods]

I second @ivan_pozdeev's reply -- I used it on some older disks which were beginning to fail and retrieved a minimal amount of info, but on disks less than 10 years old (and this was in 2007/2008) SpinRite did absolutely nothing. Indeed, it only seems to shorten the lifespan of modern drives.

[Diblo Dk]

Version 7.8.3 was capable of passing the SMART status of Hitachi (HTS547575A9E384) drive over USB.

[SharpC]

Couldn't get it to work over USB like most other tools I've tried.

[user5359531]

looks like this only supports Windows

[David Ehrmann]

It looks like the Virtual Console USB Flash Drive tester page is gone, but I found it at archive.org

[Franck Dernoncourt]

@DavidEhrmann thanks!