How can I tell if a USB hard drive will support SMART?

[dazinga]

How can I tell if a USB hard drive will support SMART?

I'm particularly interested in this one
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Sli...1_1?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1357619144&sr=1-1

 

[muckshifter]

Why?

Every hard drive I have had fail, and I've had a few, two within 5 months of each other and S.M.A.R.T. has told me nothing. So, I turned it off.

Use Chkdsk or ScanDisk, depending on your operating system.

In answer to your question ...

Depending on the type of interface being used, some S.M.A.R.T.-enabled motherboards and related software may not communicate with certain S.M.A.R.T.-capable drives. For example, few external drives connected via USB and Firewire correctly send S.M.A.R.T. data over those interfaces. With so many ways to connect a hard drive (SCSI, Fibre Channel, ATA, SATA, SAS, SSA, and so on), it is difficult to predict whether S.M.A.R.T. reports will function correctly in a given system.

... so, probably not a SMART drive.