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I've seen two external drives die without any "notice", lack of speed, performance, nothing, out of the blue, in the past 2 years.

For the current ext. usb drive I have, what would be the most secure and reliable way to check the drive health?

Oliver Salzburg
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TM23
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  • I would use the program of your choice that would report the S.M.A.R.T data to you. There are both free programs and paid programs. The core feature is the same it will warn you of a possible failure if it involves the S.M.A.R.T data – Ramhound Aug 29 '13 at 13:08

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Hard drives in external USB enclosures are the same as hard drives inside PCs - unpredictable. You can try looking at the SMART data, which might tell you something, though this paper from Google (one of the few organizations with enough HDs to actually do the relevant research) indicates that predictive models based on SMART data are pretty much doomed.

In a nutshell: You can't predict drive failure reliably. The best you can do is keep backups, and swap them out when they get old.

Michael Kohne
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  • As you point out S.M.A.R.T can only detect a problem based on data that is logged. Pure mechanical problems cannot be detected by S.M.A.R.T, you can log all the data you want, if the mechanical parts freeze up the data on the drive cannot be retrieved. The very most S.M.A.R.T data can tell you is that the drive will fail once the threshold value is reached. – Ramhound Aug 29 '13 at 13:16