While waiting for the replacement drive to arrive I decided to check the health of the harddrives in my various machines. As I found out, there’s a whole lot of manufacturer approved utilities out there. Sometimes they are easy to spot but sometimes they are buried deep within the web pages. Just so I can find them faster, some links go here:
Hitachi GST: Drive Fitness Test
Maxtor: MaxBlast / PowerMax
Samsung: HUtil (and various other tools)
Seagate: SeaTools Desktop/Enterprise
Western Digital: Data Lifeguard Diagnostics
Out of those I especially like the tools from Samsung and Maxtor. The latter allows you to low level format the drive which revived some of my older ones. HUtil from Samsung allows you to activate UDMA mode 6 (133 MB/s) on ATA-100 drives. Definitely not safe for production environments but nice for speed freaks ;)
