DiskCheckup and external USB drives

[discovery]

You list "The majority of drives connected via USB and Firewire are not supported" under known issues for DiskCheckup and it didn't detect any of my external drives like expected.

However after coming across HDDscan I was surprised it not only detected but also fully supported the USB drives. Even allows for modification of the AAM and APM features.

DiskCheckup is the only software I know that keeps a history and uses that data to give a more meaningful picture of a hard drives aging rather than having only actual failures of S.M.A.R.T. values to go after.

Having USB support in DiskCheckup would be awesome and hopefully you will consider releasing a new version with that feature in it.

[David (PassMark)]

It is technically possible to do this. But it doesn't work on all USB connections. Even HDDScan only works with some USB connected drives. You need to write special code for each USB-SATA bridge chip and the codes aren't public, and don't exist at all in other cases. So it is a lot of work to even get partial support.

[discovery]

Okay, I understand. How about allowing to import S.M.A.R.T. data manually. That way DiskCheckup could still build up an history.


It's too bad that it is not possible to view the data off currently not connected drives. DiskCheckup could load the available data indicating that the drive isn't connected. Or is there another way of reading the .bin files?

[discovery]

Version 3 now supports USB drives which is awesome, thank you.


Something changed for the "raw value" displayed data. Where previously was 5500ms next to Spin Up Time there now is 0x156B which is a lot harder to read for humans. Not sure what to do with that value honestly.

Temperature is the only correctly displayed number.



DiskCheckup 2 was freezing for a moment of up to 5-8 seconds while having an USB drive connected but version 3 does the same. I guess that is because the scanning takes a little while. The freezing becomes noticeable when switching between drives or changing tabs where apparently DiskCheckups looks up the drive data again. Getting the data on program startup would be enough in my case and would also get rid of the freezing.

[David (PassMark)]

Yes. most new USB drives are now supported by DiskCheckup. As are Firewire connected drives. We did find a few old USB drives (older than about 4 years) that didn't work, but the majority were OK.

The new release also better supports SSDs, and collects a vast amount of new technical details from the drive.

So for example, with SSD's it is now possible to detect the presense of TRIM and for most normal drives it is possible to detect the RPM speed of the drive.

We haven't seen any issues with a temporary freezing, and have tested on half a dozen machines. Maybe it because you drives are not spun up at the time of the enquiry.

The spin up time (as with most other SMART paramaters) is hard to report on. Different standards are used by manufacturers. While some manufacturers store the raw spin-up time in milliseconds as the "Raw value", others store it as seconds or even something totally cryptic. But we will change from a hex display to a decimal display.

We will also reorder the colums to have the OK/FAIL column first. Which in most cases is the intereresting part of the results. (except for some SSDs where we have seen the drive setting 0 thresholds, meaning that it isn't going to report failures).