Test USB hard drive

English Hardware
#1

The drive does not support S.M.A.R.T. For testing the drives mounted in my case I boot Spinrite from a CD as I have found it very reliable over the years. But it is SO slow testing USB mini drives. Apparently it runs at USB1.1 speed.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

#2

I use dd to see if there are any read errors

dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/null bs=1024k status=progress where sdX is the USB drive

#3

Thank you. Simple and effective.