that's what I'm trying to avoid doing :) SMART may not be too useful cos the values may not be accurate, but things like Western Digital Lifeguard are fairly accurate if the drive fails the check, time for RMA.

Hi

I'm wondering if anyone knows of a good way to diagnose whether a portable harddrive via USB is failing soon or not. Something like the harddisk manufacturers tool (eg. Western Digital LifeGuard tool) to detect the disk status. Most of them I found can't read USB portable harddisk, the closest one is HD Tune.