On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 12:17:20AM -0500, kamaraju kusumanchi wrote: > The hard drive is placed in a Dual Bay external hard drive docking > station which is connected via USB to my computer. Is that a problem?
Yes. > Is my only option to connect this hard drive internally? How does one > check the health of a drive connected via USB? Some USB<->SATA bridge devices support SMART, but many do not. smartctl knows how to query SMART parameters for some USB bridges: https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/Supported_USB-Devices In your case, either the bridge doesn't support it, or smartctl does not know how to query SMART via that particular bridge (but could perhaps be taught how to by a suitably talented programmer).
