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I own a few portable USB hard disk drives.
Recently after replacing my laptop's failing drive I was using GSmartControl (Linux) to access the SMART data on my disks, looks like all the external drives that have USB connectivity don't have SMART support.
I own 2 ADATA HD710 drives and a Western Digital MyBook 3 TB. All use USB 3.0 connectivity.
I use one ADATA drive for daily inceremental backups, and the 3 TB drive for only-copy of old data and backup disk images of my family's laptops etc.
I'm pretty sure the MyBook has a standard big SATA drive inside. Is exposing the SMART features not possible with a USB interface? Or is this something else?
On the other hand my SanDisk 32 GB USB 3.0 pendrive reports to be SMART-enabled (while displaying no data at all).
What's the matter? How do I know if my backup medium is in good shape if it won't even report bad blocks? Should I stop using USB drives for backups?
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This looks close enough that it might answer your question: http://superuser.com/a/456003/153356
– Patrick M – 2016-10-17T20:02:03.287