Maintaining a healthy hard drive is essential for protecting your valuable photos, documents and other precious data.
While a having a current backup on hand in case of disaster is an absolute must, performing a thorough diagnostic test of your PC’s hard drive on a regular basis is a great way to find out when (not if) the drive is about to bite the dust and take your data with it.
A great way to keep tabs on your hard drive’s health is to periodically run a high quality diagnostic test on it. The one I use and recommend is Seatools, a free program available directly from the hard drive manufacturer Seagate Technologies.
Seagate’s Seatools is a powerful and thorough hard drive diagnostic utility that will check the integrity of your drive and alert you to any problems, often with enough warning of impending drive failure to give you enough time to transfer the files to a new hard drive, then swap it for the old one before it dies on you. Trust me, it’s a lot easier to replace a failing drive before it fails rather than after!
Seatools is completely nondestructive to your data which means you can safely run its diagnostic routines on your hard drive without fear of losing any of your files. And although it’s a Seagate program, the Windows version will test virtually any hard drive made by any manufacturer.
You’ll find complete instructions for using Seatools here, and you can download the Windows version of the software right here.