There were three or four newish drives with the "click of death", the heads refusing to park properly.įortunately there was a 750GB with less than 1000 hours, two 250GB drives with no faults, one Seagate 250GB with one error that I corrected, a working 160GB laptop SATA drive, and surprisingly a couple of those skinny Maxtor IDEs which had big hours but no faults. There were several newish drives with I guess bad logic boards as the drive was not detected at all. Some of the drives with unfixable media faults had hours as low as 1800. Most of the drives had POH hours between 500. Since WD and Samsung only evaluate defects, which Seatools does already, why bother?Īt any rate the POH (powered on hours) was very interesting to me. It evaluates any manufacturers drives, and allows error correction on Seagate (and Maxtors made by Seagate) drives. The best tool by far was Seagate's Seatools for DOS. I downloaded all the Drive Tools I could find from Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Hitachi and Maxtor. These advanced tests and options, including format and firmware download, are not recommended for desktop system users and should be left for the professionals to avoid potential data loss.I recently bought a box of 20 plus hard drives, a mixture of IDE and SATA. Advanced test options are available for certain drive types such as SCSI and SAS interfaces. Help is available for the software and a log viewer utility is also found under the help menu. There is a System Tools menu to provide easy access to various Windows utilities that check the file system and other issues that may affect system performance but are not related to a hardware failure of the hard drive. Be sure to back up any data on the drive prior to running the repair option. The Long Generic test has the option of repairing bad sectors on external USB hard drives, and will report a failed test if a sector is found bad and cannot be repaired. The Long Drive Self-Test and Long Generic test both live up to their name, taking over three hours to run on large drives, while reading every sector on the drive. The Short Generic test performs an outer scan, an inner scan, and a random read scan of the drive and provides a good assessment of drive health in a short amount of time. check does a basic operational self-test of the drive, while the Short Drive Self-Test performs a more thorough diagnostic routine, sufficient for most needs. Seagate External Hard Drive Seagate Hard Drive Diagnostics and Testing Most tests are completely data safe with the exception of the bad sector repair option of the Long Generic test and similar bad sector repair settings in the DOS version of the software. Tests can be run on multiple drives simultaneously, and different drives can be running different tests at the same time. The drive information utility displays a surprising amount of data, including the model and serial number of the selected drive, the firmware version, and the number of hours the drive has been in operation. To check the status of a listed drive, simply check the box to select it, and click on Basic Tests from the menu and choose one of the available tests. This simple utility scans the system for internal and external hard drives and provides an intuitive list of available drives when it loads. SeaTools for DOS allows the repair of bad sectors on internal drives and is useful when problems prevent a computer from booting into Windows. Bad sector repair is offered on external drives using the Windows version of the software, and an image file included in the installation allows a DOS boot disc to be created. A full range of tests are provided, most of which are easily accessible from the main menu. SeaTools for Windows is a free download available from that offers a variety of diagnostic options for internal and external Seagate and Maxtor hard drives as well as drives from other manufacturers.
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