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I guess the title says it all. I'm getting a 2TB WD My Passport which I intend to use as a backup, but I've heard some stories of people copying all their materials to a new drive only to have it stop working after a week/month or so. So the question is, is there a software that checks the full integrity of a new drive, and is there any method to assess the health of a drive (beyond CrystalDiskInfo)? For instance, can I fill the new drive with (irrelevant) data and let it sit there for a month or so and see if the data is bit for bit identical after a month? Is that a good method? How confident can you be when it comes to a brand new portable HDD?

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  • H2testw can write a special pattern and then test it as often as you want. It was mainly developed for testing USB sticks for forged capacity values (where the stick contains e.g. only half the falsh memory it claims to have), but it also works perfectly on HDDs.
    – Robert
    Apr 14, 2021 at 12:13

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If a disk survives "stress test" it tells you nothing about possibility of failure in near future.

Solid state memory devices (SSD, flash disks) are failing on random basis. It could be dead in second without showing any symptoms.

Magnetic disks (HDD) have usually S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) diagnostic which could be read by some programs. Read How to See If Your Hard Drive Is Dying with S.M.A.R.T. (on HowToGeek.com). But SMART is only log of events over time. Some of this events could be symptoms of oncoming failure = impulse to immediately copy your data.

These portable HDDs are of two kinds.

  1. Standard SATA disk in a case with SATA<->USB converter
  2. Custom made disk without SATA

The first kind is better, because if the convertor dies or USB port is damaged, you can extract the disk from the case and use it in PC/with new convertor/case.

This is almost not possible for the second kind (WD My Passport is unfortunately this case).

The conclusion: Always have more than 1 copy of your data. Disks are dying and only thing what you can do about it is to have another copy of your data somewhere else!

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