HDD Low Level Format Tool Alternatives

Victoria

Victoria - An experimental program to work with HDD. Victoria is a small application designed to assess performance, test and perform minor repairs to your IDE drive and SATA HDD. It's designed primarily for HDD repairmen in stationary conditions and is not intended to test the system hard drive. However, compared with the DOS-programs, the utility for Windows provides the following benefits: - There is no CPU load at idle; - More user-friendly interface; - Multi-tasking;

Features:

• Bad sectors reallocation
• Portable
• Read latency benchmark per drive offset
• Support for S.M.A.R.T. data

MHDD

MHDD is the most popular freeware program for low-level HDD diagnostics. MHDD supports these interfaces: IDE, Serial ATA, SCSI. Also there is a possibility to access an USB storage, there are drivers for emulation (USB->SCSI). This software can make precise diagnostic of the mechanical part of a drive, view SMART attributes, perform Low-level format, bad sector repair, different tests and tens of other functions.

Features:

• Hardware Monitoring
• Portable
• Support for S.M.A.R.T. data

HDAT2

HDAT2 is program for test or diagnostics of ATA/ATAPI/SATA, SSD, USB and SCSI devices. HDAT2 program has 2 levels: Drive level testing - main function is testing and repair (to regenerate) bad sectors for detected devices - you get much information about detected devices File level testing - read/find/check items (MBR, boot, directories, etc.) of file system FAT12/16/32 - check/remove (regenerates) bad sectors records, flags in FAT table

Features:

• Hardware Monitoring
• Support for S.M.A.R.T. data

SeaTools

SeaTools is a diagnostic tool that helps you determine the condition of the disk drive in your external hard drive, desktop or laptop computer. The installation needs dot.NET 4 as a precondition. If dot.NET 4 is not installed, it must be installed before. Then in a further step the new dot.NET 4-installation must be updated, before you can install SeaTools. It includes several tests that will examine the physical media on your Seagate or Maxtor disk drive and any other non-Seagate disk drive.