Want to check health of flash drive

Delly10 · 13 Jul 2023

I was advised a while back to get Disk Genius to check the health of my HDD. It turned out to not be good, so now I have an SSD. But now I have a flash drive that gives me occasional problems. I think it might be dying on me, but I'd like to be sure. I tried using Disk Genius on it but when I click on S.M.A.R.T. in the Tools, I get the error message "Did not get S.M.A.R.T. information". I'm guessing that I either chose the wrong thing to check on a flash drive, or Disk Genius isn't the right app to use.

Is there another way to check the health of a flash drive?

dalchina · 13 Jul 2023

The usual tools are:
Crystal Diskinfo (free)
Hard Disk Sentinel (full functional trial/giveaways fairly frequent) - excellent commentary- covers SSDs too.

I have seen cases where SSDs in enclosures haven't returned results.

I found this which may help:

Most tools have trouble passing the SMART status of hard drives over USB.

Your best bet for getting the health status from the drive over USB from a generic tool is smartctl from smartmontools. A version that works on Windows with a nice GUI is available here. If this does not work, you will have to download and install the device specific management tool from the manufacturer. The management tool will have a health checker for the drive. Here is the site for western digital. Here is the site for Seagate. You could also take out the drive from the external enclosure and hook it up to your PC directly using SATA or IDE and then read the status using standard tools like HDTune or Smartctl.

smartctl support for USB is described in more detail here.

from
Is it possible to check an external USB Drive health (SMART)? - Super User

GSmartControl . Hard disk drive and SSD health inspection tool

Megahertz · 14 Jul 2023

For flash drives I use H2testw

Delly10 · 14 Jul 2023

dalchina said:

The usual tools are:
Crystal Diskinfo (free)
Hard Disk Sentinel (full functional trial/giveaways fairly frequent) - excellent commentary- covers SSDs too.

I have seen cases where SSDs in enclosures haven't returned results.

I found this which may help:

from
Is it possible to check an external USB Drive health (SMART)? - Super User

GSmartControl . Hard disk drive and SSD health inspection tool

I tried the portable version of GSmartControl and it doesn't detect any of my drives, even though they're plugged in and functioning.

SIW2 · 14 Jul 2023

not all usb flash disks report smart info.

Delly10 · 14 Jul 2023

Megahertz said:

For flash drives I use H2testw

Just tried this one now, but it won't let me select the data volume to test for some reason. The small amount it had set as a default didn't find any errors, but it was only a tiny amount of the flash drive's capacity.

dalchina · 14 Jul 2023

As for flash drives - true, standard tools do not seem to report SMART params for those. Sorry, should have made that clear.

Example report for a flash drive from Hard Disk Sentinel: - note the test method suggested...

The status of the hard disk is unknown.
This USB storage device does not provide more information about itself. Anyway, it can be tested for problems by Disk -> Surface test function.

Please use the "Report" menu "Send test report to developer" option to help us determining if it is possible to detect and display more information.
Please visit the "Hardware" and "Support -> FAQ" sections on Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoring for details.

- and it's not detected by Crystal Diskinfo.

Some options from Google:
5 Free USB Flash Drive Tester & Checker Tools [Best in 2023]

Delly10 · 14 Jul 2023

Just tried downloading the first one in the list called "Check Flash". All I got was the following message: "Malicious Site Blocked!"

I think I better just use the flash drive until it simply stops working. I've been told that flash drives don't show signs of dying before they actually die, but I've had a few weird things happen with mine lately, so it's gotten me to wonder. But it's looking as if testing it isn't as easy as testing an HDD or SSD.

Megahertz · 14 Jul 2023

Delly10 said:

Just tried this one now, but it won't let me select the data volume to test for some reason. The small amount it had set as a default didn't find any errors, but it was only a tiny amount of the flash drive's capacity.

Does the drive has two partitions?
Does the data partition has a letter assigned to it?

Delly10 · 14 Jul 2023

I don't know about partitions, but the drive letter on the computer for it is "E".