Reliability is pivotal significance for switched reluctance machine drives (SRD) applied to safety essential transportation and industrial fields. An inter-turn shorted-circuit fault (ISCF) could incite the machine to operate in unbalanced status, resulting in the noise increases. In the event such a fault remains untreated, the fault will further destroy the rest of the normal phases, even leading to a tragic incident for the entire drive application. To improve the reliability of SRD, an efficient on-line fault diagnosis method for ISCF should be proposed. This paper is focused on employing the strong track filter (STF) to achieve real-time phase resistance differences between before and after ISCF, which are used as features to diagnose the fault occurrence and the fault phase. Furthermore, a classification namely as linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is selected to estimate fault severity. Finally, simulation and experiments correspond to various running statuses are executed and their results can verify that the diagnosis method has accuracy and robustness.