

Once your hard drive starts giving you errors, it’s probably too late. You have to prevent the problem before it occurs. Protecting your data is just like Smokey the Bear’s message. His job was to convince people to prevent forest fires. You can also experience data loss when parts of your drive stop working.ĭo you remember Smokey the Bear? He’s an iconic US National Parks public service announcement character. But even before five years, a failing hard drive could slow down your computer due to bad sectors and slowing performance. More importantly, the hard drive failure rate goes up dramatically after five years. Given enough time, every hard drive will fail. Seagate SeaTools is a drive utility worth considering for drive-related duties: it can recognize a faulty drive, format your storage, and more.Wrong. Through it, users can manage and format their drives without any intervention from their operating system. In addition, you can also create a bootable Linux USB drive of this software.

Secure Erase options are available, which can be useful if you're looking to make the deleted data on your drive completely unrecoverable - this can come in handy if you're looking to sell a drive. Users can format their drive through this solution. Spin Down can help if you're looking to reduce power consumption, and there's also a Firmware Update utility, which can help you install new firmware for your drives. In addition, users can manage how their drive handles blocks of data via the LBA option. It's worth backing up everything before proceeding with this option. If something comes up, you can try using the Fix All option: through it, the software attempts to repair and replace the bad blocks on your drive. The latter option conducts a more thorough examination of your drive to look for bad sectors and other such signs of failure. If you want to be a little more particular, you can opt for a quick or extended test. And that's how it works here: if you don't know what type of test to run, click Self Test, and wait for the results. Testing your drive shouldn't be a complicated process - after all, most of it should be automatic. It allows users to test their drives in various ways, and it also offers a few options for formatting/erasing one's storage, among other things. Being proactive helps, and checking your drives for errors and bad sectors, as well as making periodic backups, is something that may help you in the long run.ĭrive manufacturers often have their own software to offer to help with that, and Seagate SeaTools is an offering from one such manufacturers. However, that does not exclude data loss events from occurring, but it's nice to be proactive. Taking care of your drives ensures that they will perform for years to come, and serve you and your data well.
