Windows Surface Scanner is described as 'Free, fast utility that scans your hard drive(s) for physical errors. It will examine each sector on your hard drive for read errors and reports them if found. It is purely diagnostic and will not fix or “mark” bad sectors or recover data' and is an app. There are seven alternatives to Windows Surface Scanner for Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac. The best Windows Surface Scanner alternative is GSmartControl, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Windows Surface Scanner are smartmontools, SeaTools, StableBit Scanner and Pc-Check.
GSmartControl provides a GUI for smartctl from smartmontools, allowing users to monitor and control SMART data on hard drives. It supports health inspection, runs diagnostic tests, and warns about potential drive failures, ensuring maintenance and optimal disk performance.
The smartmontools package contains two utility programs (smartctl and smartd) to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI harddisks.
SeaTools is a diagnostic tool that helps you determine the condition of the disk drive in your external hard drive, desktop or laptop computer.
StableBit Scanner is a state of the art disk health monitoring tool.
Pc-Check will scan for errors in all hardware components on the computer it is being deployed on and display diagnostic results. The software is bootable from CDs and USBs, so even if the OS won't start the program will still be able to run.
Diskscan is intended to provide the information needed to decide if a disk is good or not, be it an HDD or an SSD it is likely to be holding important data and if you have a suspicion that it is failing it is also important to know how bad is it down the road.
Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test (DFT) quickly and reliably tests SCSI, IDE and SATA drives. The DFT analyze function performs read tests without overwriting data.
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