I recently purchased a Western Digital 1TB 7200 RPM hard drive for my desktop computer and I love it! It has loads of space and is super quiet.
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However, when I received it from Newegg, I was not completely sure the drive would be working properly since it was wrapped in a little piece of bubble wrap and nothing else! To remove any chances of the drive having some kind of internal errors, I decided to test it out with some free hard drive diagnostic tools.
Since I had a Western Digital drive, I ended up using the WD diagnostic tools for that specific model. Luckily, just about every major brand has their own diagnostic tools for hard drives. In this post, I will list out the various tools that you can use to ensure the integrity of a hard drive.
Microsoft Error Checking (Chkdsk)
Software designed for Seagate HDDs: The first utility wholly developed for restoration and data retrieve of Seagate HDD in the world. You can do what others can't do with this powerful utility.
One hard drive testing tool that is already built into Windows is chkdsk. It will scan the entire hard drive and check for a wide range of possible errors.
You can access it by right-clicking on the drive in My Computer and choosing Properties. Then click on the Tools tab and under Error-checking, you’ll see the option Check Now.
Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic
The Data Lifeguard Diagnostic tools for Western Digitaldrives includes both DOS and Windows versions and is written to test many different types of WD drives. Only use the DOS version if you are have a new system with no operating system installed.
It includes a Quick Test, Extended Test, and Write Zeros test. Note that you can also use these tools to test drives from a different manufacturer also.
Seagate SeaTools
Seagate has two sets of easy-to-use diagnostic tools called SeaTools, one for DOS and the other for Windows. The DOS version will test Seagate or Maxtor PATA, IDE, and SATA hard drives.
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The Windows version will test any non-Seagate drive and supports more interfaces, such as USB, 1394, ATA, SATA, and SCSI. It checks for file system corruption, broken master boots record, driver corruption, and lots more.
You can perform a SMART check, short check, long check and other advanced tests.
HDDScan
HDDScan is an excellent free program for hard drive diagnostics. In addition to standard hard drives, it also supports RAID array servers, USB flash drives and SSDs. It can check for bad blocks and bad sectors, it can show S.M.A.R.T attributes for a drive and it can even change some hard drive parameters like AAM, APM, etc.
It can also perform regular health checks on your drive and give you a prediction on when the hard drive could start degrading. It supports all the different types of drives and can be run without having to install it.
Hitachi Drive Fitness Test
The Drive Fitness Test from Hitachi is a really quick and reliable way to test SCSI, SATA, and IDE hard drives. The test performs read test without overwriting any data already on the drive. It does not support USB or Firewire drives.
Maxtor PowerMax
Maxtor PowerMax is designed to perform read/write diagnostic functions on Maxtor and Quantum hard drives only to ensure the integrity of the drives. This program is a bit old and really should only be used as a last resort. The other disk drive diagnostic utilities mentioned above are much better.
Those are pretty much all of the free tools out there that I can think of for testing hard drives! If you know of any others, please post a comment! Enjoy!
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