Review of Seagate SeaTools for Windows

SeaTools is a program used to diagnose and test the performance of Seagate and Maxtor hard drives. You should use this utility if you've detected failures and problems in your HDD operation or you want to check your device current state.

What is suitable for the testing:

• SCSI, PATA and SATA internal hard drives;
• external hard drives connected via a USB or FireWire.

SeaTools versions: for Windows and DOS

There are two versions of SeaTools:

SeaTools for Windows:

• with a graphical interface
• and the program is available only for Windows

SeaTools for DOS:

• command line utility which runs under DOS
• and can also be used with any Windows version,
• it's pretty convenient to launch it from a boot disk in order to restore your HDD performance (we've already told you how to burn such disk)

Despite the fact that the DOS version of SeaTools has more capabilities, in this review we'll discuss the GUI version of the program for Windows 10.

Where you can download SeaTools from

For safety reasons it's better to download SeaTools from the official website in "Downloads" section at the link SeaTools for Windows.

3 main features of SeaTools

The main purpose of SeaTools utility is to detect errors in your hard drive performance and find out whether it should be replaced on a warranty.

Tests are provided in order to check the current state. As a result of it, detailed information on its performance and the status of each test is displayed.

One of such tests is Acoustic Test which allows you to detect problems, if your hard drive makes suspicious sounds. For such purpose SeaTools accelerates and stops an HDD so that you can hear how it works and check if it makes “unhealthy” noise.

Another feature is the repair of bad sectors on SATA hard drives and external USB flash drives. If bad sectors are found after testing, not only SeaTools will display errors, but it will also offer you to fix them (replace the damaged blocks with backup ones). Thus, this bad sector will no longer be used by your operating system.

We should also highlight the reading of SMART-attributes. SeaTools reports on the status of your HDD as well as on the characteristics of your drive. This information will be useful for checking the status of your hard drive.

Conclusion. SeaTools is an effective and free tool which will be useful for diagnosing and monitoring your HDD status. It's wise to use this program at least occasionally in order to prevent a sudden disk failure along with a loss of data.

We also suggest you getting acquainted with similar utilities, which we've mentioned in this review.