GSmartControl can run various hard drive tests with detailed results and give an overall health assessment of a drive. When exporting information, it includes everything, not just a specific result you want to save
Do you have another suggestion for protection? If you've tried any of the above, get back to us with your favorite.Doesn't support every USB and RAID device
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The above third party tools are a few of the popular free utilities I've found. Play with each of tools, and find the best that suits your situation. It will force you to clone your hard drive or backing up your data on a regular basis before the inevitable happens. But if you are worrisome about the state of your current HDD and you'd like to confirm it, these tools will help to do so. Thorough test and repair utilities for West Digital drives.Īll of the tools above may or may not be able to resolve serious disk errors on your drive. Western Digital - In order to determine your appropriate tools, you'll first have to select your specific product and browse to a compatible 'Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Tools'.
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Seagate/Maxtor - The Seagate tools, also known as Seatools, are Windows specific tools that can quickly and comprehensively determine the state of your present Seagate or Maxtor hard drive.
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Samsung - The Samsung utility will only work with Samsung drives and is an offline bootable disk that can be run no matter what the state of your drive. Analyze, optimize and protect your drive from failure. Hitachi - Several diagnostic tools for Hitachi drives. A few of these may even support different manufacturers. So I've provided a list of all the major manufacturers with a link to their diagnostic tools. Some people might trust products designated for their specific hard drive more then any other. This includes temperature readings, read/write errors and power management tools, running at all times of the day. It displays an incredible amount of simple and advanced disk information, and may always be running in the background. based utility that supports not only internal drives, but both USB and IEEE1394's as well. (Windows Only) CrystalDiskInfoĬrystalDiskInfo is a S.M.A.R.T. Most of these incorporate the built-in SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) feature with most of today's hard disks.
To help predict and protect yourself from these the inevitable circumstances of a hard drive failure, I have come up with four third party diagnostic tools, and a list of the all the major hard drive manufacturer tools. A hard disk failure means a dead computer - unless you are lucky enough to be running in some type of RAID environment, which most home users won't be. The most unfortunate part of the problems with these drives, is how incredibly critical they are to the state of your computer. And this will continue to be the case until solid state drives become much cheaper and much more compatible for present day hardware. The standard IDE/SATA hard drive today is still the most mechanical piece of equipment sitting in your present day PC. So, what can you do to prevent hard drive failure?
Most however, are going to choose the hard drive. If there is one piece of equipment in your computer that you would predict to fail first, what would it be? Some might pick the power supply, some might pick the motherboard and even some might pick the video card.