Well, smartctl -a -d sat /dev/sdd (run from smartmontools for Windows) did work for my Kingston Hyper X(basically an Intel SSD in an external Kingston labeled box).
But it didn't work for my WD "something" 1TB. Not sure what it is since the sticker letters are rubbed off and I got no results from the smartctl.
Cyberjock, I agree that USB is not professional tool, but I'm in the same situation about the needs of one ext drive. unfortunately I can not have an offsite syncing box because of the sensitive data, or I need to spend double for securing and peer to peer leased line, even keeping it cool and 24/7 powered. so the only way to me to do backups is locally. im expecting these days a SM X9SAE, 16GB ECC, E3-1230 and I still have plenty of WD RE4 1TB HDD in stock. I'm going to retire my Dell 1600SC that is working from many years. till now I did do incremental backups during working days to Tape library and in the week end a full backup, and put tapes every next day to a fire resistant box in the office. mainly are docs in word, excel and pdf so is not an oversized storage. 3 depts. with approx. 25-30 GB each with a rising expectation of 1 GB/Year. So what I'm thinking is to make a RAIDZ2 or maybe a stripe of mirrored RAIDZ to have a 2TB array protected by 2 failures. but I will test for that to get the best in performance. so returning to the point of backups what do you think is better (not proff.) a USB3 or e-sata ext HDD to do at least a weakly full backup? is possible functioning of the "tar" so I make a zipped copy of the datasets and possibly put the file name date and time? also since I don't have it up an running yet, is possible to auto mount a ext. HDD at the same pos i.e:/mnt/"ext..." and may be in NTFS FS?
well it went quite long story, I was writing and thinking possible options too. cheers to you.