Any SMART disk experts? I have a failing external USB drive (spinning rust kind) that I'm trying to get the data off. It has quite a lot of bad sectors that fail the CRC check. The read is going very slowly due to the retries on bad sectors and I'm currently estimating 1-2 weeks to read the whole thing.

Is there a way to make this go faster, such as tuning the number of retries so it gives up faster on the bad sectors?

Thanks everyone who suggested ddrescue! Even with the USB interface to the drive it is estimating only 12 hours to copy 160GB. And I finally installed Linux natively on a physical computer in my house for the first time in over a decade πŸ˜‚
@vaurora congrats, and welcome!