Any software recommendations?

GrizzlyBear0 · August 21, 2020

So can someone recommend me some Softwares for storage maintenance and repair something that actually works? because my hard disk seems to have issues.

P.S it doesn't matter if the software is paid or free i'm just looking for something that actually works.

Thanks in advance for any help.

minibois · August 21, 2020

6 minutes ago, GrizzlyBear0 said:

So can someone recommend me some Softwares for storage maintenance and repair something that actually works? because my hard disk seems to have issues.

P.S it doesn't matter if the software is paid or free i'm just looking for something that actually works.

You can use CrystalDiskInfo to read the SMART info of the drive to see if it's alright. You can use CrystalDiskMark to test the drive's speed.

WereCatf · August 21, 2020

7 minutes ago, GrizzlyBear0 said:

Softwares for storage maintenance and repair something that actually works?

Without explaining what issues you are having, it's pretty much impossible to recommend anything. If the issues are in the hardware, there is no software that can repair it, for example.

SupaKomputa · August 21, 2020

HD Sentinel

Uptivuptiz · August 21, 2020

Minitool Partition Wizard is a great tool for managing storage devices.

mariushm · August 21, 2020

WD data lifeguard diagnostics (works with any drive not just WD drives) is good for scanning the surface of mechanical drives and marking problem / bad sectors as bad - downside is that the test does this by erasing the whole drive , so you must first backup anything you care about on the drive.

See https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/6226

The software is small (megabytes) and freely available on their site ... use the WIPE / ERASE on drive, shut down, start ...after restart, a drive's firmware will refresh its internal list of bad sectors and move all data from sensitive/failing/bad sectors that were detected during the previous test and marks all problem sectors as bad.

HD Tune Pro (trial works for 30 days, and can also be found on p2p sites) has a nice health scan section, where it shows the surface of the drive and will show sectors with bad sectors.

You can use that map to create partitions on a drive with bad sectors in such a way as to avoid those damaged areas of a drive - for example if you have a 1 TB (931 GB) drive and you have a group of bad sectors around 800-810 GB, you could make 3 partitions on your drive : 0-790 , 790-820 , and 820-931 ... and only give letters to first and last partition. The bad sectors will be isolated on a hidden partition with around 5-10 GB of "buffer area" ... this way you're no longer reading or writing data into that region with bad sectors that may have other weak or failing sectors which aren't degraded enough to be yet marked as bad.

If most bad sectors are very close to the edge of a drive, you may even consider making a single partition that doesn't get close to the bad area, in the example above make only a 0...790 GB partition... for example if you don't want the heads of a drive to ever fly across that region (let's say you think there may be some particles breaking off the disk surface and particles may touch the heads and do further damage)