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Found out my backup drive was failing three months too late
My main SSD died last Tuesday while I was in the middle of rebuilding a client's workstation. Thought I was smart keeping a separate external drive for backups. Turns out that drive had been throwing SMART errors for months and I never checked. The event log showed it started failing around April but I just never looked. Anyone here actually run regular SMART checks on their backup drives or am I the only one who got lazy?
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eric_murray2621d ago
One of those data recovery guys on YouTube did a breakdown and said most external drives don't even report SMART properly over USB, so you're probably not alone lol. I set up a free tool called CrystalDiskInfo to check mine every couple weeks now after reading that. The scary part is how fast they can go from "okay" to completely dead, like three months is actually pretty good warning time in the grand scheme.
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dylan_bell21d ago
Does CrystalDiskInfo even work on most external drives though? I've read it can't access the SMART data on a lot of USB enclosures, so you might be checking nothing.
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