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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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HDD testing tools from their manufacturers

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/08

Below are some links for (at the moment of writing) current HDD testing tools from various HDD manufacturers.

Note:
If you want a whole bunch of these tools on a bootable CD, then download the latest version of Ultimate Boot CD.

Note: on HDD settings.
HDD settings can be changed by some of theses tools, or by using some jumpers.
Be especially carefull when changing these settings:

  1. SATA speed;
    make sure your SATA speed does not exceed the limit of your hardware, see below.
  2. SSC (Spread Spectrum Clocking);
    don’t enable this if your HDD works fine; see this message thread why.
  3. NCQ in combination with RAID;
    usually the RAID controller knows better than the drive about the data patterns.

Ad 1:
I personally have experienced this with this specific case:

Often the disk would not be recognized.
The cause was the SATA configuration.
These disks were factory configured at SATA 2.0 (3 GB/s speed), but the UltraBay SATA adapter converts from SATA 1.0 (1.5 Gb/s speed) to PATA.

Setting the drive to SATA 1.0 (1.5 Gb/sspeed) solved the problem completely.

–jeroen

This entry was posted on 2010/06/08 at 06:00 and is filed under Hardware, Power User. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “HDD testing tools from their manufacturers”

  1. IL's avatar

    IL said

    2010/06/09 at 22:04

    And if you have or buy Seagate drives don’t forget to check it in a list of drives whose firmware needs to be updated http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931
    “At this time, we have firmware available for Barracuda 7200.12, DiamondMax 23, Barracuda LP, Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 (SATA) and DiamondMax 22 drive families”

    Reply

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