Hard Disk Monitoring

I was just wondering if it's possible for an external hard drive to be harmed in any way if my computer goes into sleep mode at any time during an extended self-test. These things usually take a little over 8 hours to complete for me, and I'm obviously not always going to be rooted to the computer d...

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. Yes, the external drive is connected with a USB cable but it has it's own power adapter so I'm wondering whether or not that's a factor that should be considered. Anyway, I'm going to run through everything you suggested and try that so hopefully something w...

The power off retract cycle count has increased by 2 on one of my drives in the span of a week despite the absence of any discernible problems. The disk in question is an external desktop 4TB Western Digital Easystore (which is basically just a rebranded MyBook), and I cannot come up with a reasonab...