How To Test a Hard Drive
Test driving a car allows you to gauge if it performs to your liking. But when you test drive a PC hard disk, whether at home or in the office, you either want to optimize its performance or confirm your suspicions that it has a problem. Luckily there's no lack of software utilities that can do the job without costing a dime. In fact, you don't need to look further than freeware PC diagnostic tools to get the basics of testing your hard drive out of the way. If you require a more advanced and comprehensive set of test features, you won't be disappointed as there are excellent retail testing solutions to test your hard disk.
Built-in Windows Tools
If you are a Windows user, you know that the OS comes with its own diagnostic tools. Its error checking facilities will tell you if there are bad sectors in the disk as well as recommend defragmenting it to improve hard disk seek time and overall PC performance. If a sudden power outage happens and you don't have a UPS, the next time you boot up Windows will prompt you to check your hard drives and check for parity errors and indexing synchronization.
Third Party Hard Disk Testing Utilities
Your hard disk manufacturer like Seagate, Samsung, or Western Digital, for instance, often include a more powerful testing utility that often comes with the purchase or one that you can download from the website. They can do a more thorough check on your hard disk that Windows could have missed. But if you're not convinced of the results of these tests and your hard disk continues to give your suspicions, opting for more feature-rich retail versions could be your savior. Considered among the best hard disk diagnostic utilities are SpinRite and Hard Drive Mechanic.
- SpinRite is a professional quality software utility that runs on Windows and Linux and is acclaimed as one of the finest hard drive testing solution in the market. It works to maintain your hard drive health and recover data from a hard disk failure or crash.
- Hard Drive Mechanic is priced lower and is claimed to easily repair most of the hard drive ailments that cause performance degradation in your PC. It is also a no-nonsense data recovery tool that can rebuild data after a hard disk crash.
Where can I Get the Manufacturor Testing Tools?
Check out this page for a list of diagnostic tools that you can download free from the hard drive manufacturor. Please note that to use the manufacturor tools you will have to know what brand your hard drive is.