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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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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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