Hello everyone, I have a simple question. Recently I have purchased an external enclosure case for 3.5 ide hard disk drives. It lets you connect your ata (old type) drive externally, through simple usb 2.0 cable. I found that computer takes it as a removable media/drive, thus my diagnostic software not being able to show drive?s health status, temperature, and de-fragmentation software not showing it in hard drives list. Basically as I see its being taken by computer as a simple usb flash drive. My question is: is there such software that will let me check health status, temperature and other info about my ata 40GB drive while it is connected through that external case? I think its an important thing because when this drive will come to it?s life end and I won?t be able to check health status, I will loose all my information before doing the backup. Thank you much. The beat never fades!

Try accessing the external drive in Disk management. From there, Right click the drive> select Properties> tools. You can run the same tools as can be used on the internal drives. SMART will not work nor will temperature monitoring. I don’t know of any tool to monitor the temps of an external drive, not to say a utility doesn’t exist. The External should be used as the backup drive not an extension of your system drive. The rule of thumb is that any data you wish to keep should have at least one backup.

This is what i use to gauge the temperature of my external drives. As a side note, you shouldn't rely on SMART to tell you when the drive's going. Before every HDD crash that I've had, SMART told me there was nothing wrong.

Thanks a lot, You guys gave me decent and useful advices, especially about the SMART system. I was actually really relying on it... damn... Regards The beat never fades!