Software to check hard drive health, temperature status, etc via 3.5 e

[az0000000]

Hello everyone,

I have a simple question.

Recently I have purchased an external enclosure case for 3.5 ide hard disk drives. It lets you connect your ata (old type) drive externally, through simple usb 2.0 cable.

I found that computer takes it as a removable media/drive, thus my diagnostic software not being able to show drive’s health status, temperature, and de-fragmentation software not showing it in hard drives list. Basically as I see its being taken by computer as a simple usb flash drive.

My question is: is there such software that will let me check health status, temperature and other info about my ata 40GB drive while it is connected through that external case? I think its an important thing because when this drive will come to it’s life end and I won’t be able to check health status, I will loose all my information before doing the backup.

Thank you much.

[Mijzelf]

You want to read the SMART status, while the drive is an USB mass storage device. AFAIK there is no standardized way to get SMART data from an USB device.

Besides, it's dangerous to wait until SMART alarms you to backup. A drive can die without warning.

[Tarun]

Check out HDTune. It should be able to do exactly what you're looking for.

[az0000000]

Check out HDTune. It should be able to do exactly what you're looking for.

Thanks but nope, it doesn't.

[lingk]

I just use the computer management that is built into windows to check the defrag stuff of my hard drives that i have plugged in via usb, never once had an issue of it not seeing it. hell, i can even get spinrite6.0 to run scans on my external hard drives. maybe its a usb setting in your bios?

[az0000000]

Thanks for info about spinrite.