I've run across (personally or by proxy) a bunch of storage media that exhibited physical problems during their life. Hard disks, solid state drives and other flash storage media all fail after some time. The situation is worse with USB flash drives and flash cards because of the large amount of suppliers with inferior flash cell and flash controller quality.
How can I reliably detect if a storage drive suffers from physical damage?
Note that this question isn't about file system integrity (which can be checked with fsck(8)).
