Not particularly specific right now because hard drives tend to have differing features. For external drives, I look at:
- whether or not the vendor software (if they have one) is supported and required for some features - in some cases it’s not needed,
- do features of the drive (that are normally available) work (commonly not working is hardware based encryption it seems)
- if it can be mounted correctly by linux out of the box or is it iffy (like being formatted with NTFS, because NTFS on linux can get real annoying, really fast)
I do wish to eventually create a more concrete way of testing but features vary between drives so I’m unsure of how to account for that right now and I have no idea what I’d test consistently between drives.
I’d be open to ideas for what specific things to test and I can append those later.