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Sea Tools is a free tool released by Seagate, that can scan and diagnose the hard disk drives of any brand. This tool can prove very useful as it offers lot of tests that are available in professional hard disk scanning software. Most of the available tests are data safe tests i.e. when you carry out this test the data present in hard disk drive does not get affected except for few which you should use with caution as they are not data safe tests.

Sea Tools supports the following types of hard disk drive interfaces: USB, 1394, ATA (PATA/IDE), SATA and SCSI.

Types of tests and diagnostics available in Sea Tools:

• SMART Check: This test finds out the status of hard drive from the SMART feature of the hard disk drive.
• Short Drive Self Test: In this test hard disk drive performs diagnostics that are built into its firmware. The test may last for around 90 seconds.
• Long Drive Self Test: This test is the longer version of the short drive self test and may take up to 15-20 minutes to complete.
• Drive Information: Using this mode detailed information about the hard disk can be found and also can be saved to file for further use.
• Short Generic Test: In this test the drive does a quick reading of the hard disk sectors to find out any probable errors.
• Long Generic Test: In this mode each and every sector of hard disk drive is read and tested and hence may take quite a long time if the hard disk drive that is being tested is a high capacity drive.
• Advanced Tests (Caution Data Destructive test): In this test the firmware for SCSI, SAS and Fibre Channel type hard disk drives are downloaded and in second advanced test the hard disk drive is formatted with 512 byte block size for testing.

This is an amazing tool that is freely available and with such good features. The most noteworthy feature of this software is that Seagate was kind enough to support all the brands of hard disk drives instead of just limiting this software only Seagate and Maxtor drives. If you are in IT support services this tool is a must for troubleshoot the hard disk drives.

We have tested this tool in Windows Vista and Windows XP.

Download Sea Tools (Direct Download) Home Page

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