Even if the tool does test USB which I know it does, the fact of the matter is that there are limitations with most of the breadboards that do USB > SATA for example which mean that you will sometimes see a drive that is faulty be marked as healthy; this is hardware so there is nothing that software can do. Also, if you're using USB 2.0, you really have no idea how well the drive is performing if it can outstrip USB's speeds. To give you an idea, an old 5400RPM 2.5 IDE drive will give you round about the same throughput when doing sequential writes (Which is a largely synthetic benchmark) that a good USB 2 chipset will give you. Unfortunately there are some drives that can only be tested via USB - some WD externals for example, but if you suspect a fault with one of these, I'd suggest that you make a backup while you can and buy an external that has a standard 2.5 / 3.5 drive inside. Hitachi are fairly good for this. Just my opinion of course. Cheers, Ben. On 9/15/12, Mgr. Janusz Chmiel <chmiel@deep.cz> wrote:
Dear developers and advanced users, I Am recommending You two tools, which are freeware and are perfectly accessible with screen readers. The best free tool for harddrive diagnostic, even for USB harddrives diagnostic is CrystalDiskInfo There is stable and also Beta release for this tool. Program is MSAA fully compatible and all controls can be reached by using standard Windows keyboard shortcuts. Download this excellent tool from here.
http://hiyohiyo.s181.coreserver.jp/CrystalDiskInfo5_1_0Alpha1.zip This is Alpha release, stable release can be downloaded from
http://hiyohiyo.s181.coreserver.jp/CrystalDiskInfo5_0_4-en.exe
For finding remapped sectors, which are not set as remapped but are corrupted, it is best to useSpeedFan application. Install it and use smart tab and use extended test. The power of this tool is, that it is enforcing The harddrive test, similar algorithm, which is being used by harddrive manufacturers to assign bad sectors as remapped. You can compare The number of remapped harddisk sectors may be, that after executing short or extended test from SpeedFan, The number of remapped sectors can increase. Do not be engry to this program, it is not writing bad sectors, it is only recalling special harddisk internal test, which can find bad sectors and will reassign them as remapped. This can save You alot of data. Unfortunately, this program is not supporting so much USB external harddisks.
Download SpeedFan from here.
http://www.almico.com/installspeedfan446.exe
And I Am recommending You to use Marking program available on The WEB site of The Crystal disk info program. The WEB site address is here.
http://crystalmark.info/?lang=en
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