looking for s.m.a.r.t utility for usb hard drive

Hello folks,

I was wondering if anyone could recommend a s.m.a.r.t. monitoring utilty for an external hard drive I used. I have an ultra USB drive enclosure which contains an 80 gig western digital caviar hard drive. I would like to check the health of the 80 gig but I have not been able to find a freeware utility to check it. The model number of my 80 gig is wd800jb-00eta0.

Also, does anyone know a good utility to lock/encrypt the folders on the 80 gig? I downloaded handibits easy crypto and it works great. Only problem is that I don't want to encrypt all the data on the hard drive because it takes so long. A better choice would be a free utility to lock down the folder or encrypt the folder so that people could not access it.

Thanks for your help!

Never had any luck with that. Best thing to do is take it out of the case, and hook it back up to an IDE channel to read the SMART data if you really need to.

I think it has something to do with the IDE>USB bridge chip. The chip may or may not collect and report SMART data, i'm not sure. I'm thinking they dont, but they very well could but the external enclosure companies have been too lazy to write a utility to collect that. 99.9% of people who buy those just plug them in and forget, so the SMART data thing isn't too high on their list.