Drive Testing Freeware

  • Thread starter Thread starter Chris Dubea
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Chris Dubea

Hi all,

The 30 gb drive on my daughters laptop began behaving oddly a while
back. I swapped it for a 20 gb drive I had in a portable storage
device, but I would like to see if the 30 gb drive is still useable.

It reads and writes okay, and the standard windows diagnostics perform
okay, but it seems dreadfully slow to me. Back in the good ol' DOS
days, there used to be a plethora of hard drive speed testers out
there. I went looking around and could find none that ran from
Windows.

Are there any free hard drive speed test utilities that run under
Win2K?

Thanks,
===========================================================================
Chris
 
Chris said:
Hi all,

The 30 gb drive on my daughters laptop began behaving oddly a while
back. I swapped it for a 20 gb drive I had in a portable storage
device, but I would like to see if the 30 gb drive is still useable.

It reads and writes okay, and the standard windows diagnostics perform
okay, but it seems dreadfully slow to me. Back in the good ol' DOS
days, there used to be a plethora of hard drive speed testers out
there. I went looking around and could find none that ran from
Windows.

Are there any free hard drive speed test utilities that run under
Win2K?
Click to expand...

http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/english.html for benchmarking programs

For their hard disk drives benchmarking page you can go to :
http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/be_hdd.html

Or, to view a list of only freeware, go to their Program Lookup page :
http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/wizard_e.html
which offers a wizard, where you can enter :
'Hard Disk Drive', 'Windows', 'Benchmark', 'Freeware'
 
Hi Chris,

The major manufacturers provide hard-drive utilities which do low-level
formatting. This isn't what you necessarily want, of course, but part of
their functionality is to test at that level and report whether and what the
problems are. The information isn't comprehensive however it gives some idea
of whether the drive is dodgy.

There is also the SMART information which drives provide and ther are
programs which can query this. One of the most interesting values, perhaps,
is the number of sectors which have been failed and been remapped. Every
hard drive has a limited number of sectors set aside for this remapping.
When a sector fails the hard drive itself remaps requests for the bad sector
to its replacement (and that's why drives no longer have lists of bad
sectors printed on them). Once the replacement sectors have all been used
up, well, igh time for your disk to go the way of Arnie's T1000.

I'm sorry I can't give you links for these. I did the research months ago
when I was having HD problems and I've lost it all because my hard drive
crashed. Lol, just kidding but I only have the programs themselves, not the
links :-).

Things to Google:
SMART v1.01 (Beyond Logic) - a 30-day trial which should be plenty for
your needs.
Powermax (Maxtor's utility. Seagate, IBM/Hitachi and Western Digital all
do their own versions. You may have to hunt around a bit on their sites.)
"Active SMART" - also trialware, I think.
"IDE Diag" 1.03 (maybe IDEDiag)
"IDE Scan 2" - freeware as far as I remember.

IDE Diag is quite interesting; it draws a 3D map of the sectors showing how
long each took to access (an indication of how good/bad the sector is).

Hope this puts you on the right track.
Mr F.
:-)
 
Hi Chris,

The major manufacturers provide hard-drive utilities which do low-level
formatting. This isn't what you necessarily want, of course, but part of
their functionality is to test at that level and report whether and what the
problems are. The information isn't comprehensive however it gives some idea
of whether the drive is dodgy.
...snippage

Hope this puts you on the right track.
Mr F.
:-)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info, and unfortunately, Toshiba doesn't have any
utilities available to the common user.

I will do some Googling around for the utils you mention.

Chris
===========================================================================
Chris
 
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