Ariolic Disk Scanner

Believe it or not, hardware components have limited life spans too and can wear off if put under too much pressure. This includes your hard disk drive too so you might want to think twice before filling it with files you don’t use. To check if it’s ok, or a specific drive can be read, then Ariolic Disk Scanner is what you need.

The application starts off on the right foot in the sense that it doesn’t even take you through an installer to let you use its set of features. Apart from the fact you can store and use it from an USB Flash drive, your PC remains clean since registries don’t need to be tweaked for the application to work.

All its features are stored in a compact window that poses no accommodation problems whatsoever. Most of the space is filled with tiny blocks, each representing a sector of the target device. The upper toolbar is fitted with the controls you need to pick a drive, as well as put the process in motion. You can find info regarding the status of the drive, as well as what colors represent.

If you want to scan an external device and already launched the application, you can just plug it in, because it’s automatically detected and added to the list. The drive you want to scan is picked from a drop-down menu, and it also shows the letter, name, and total size.

Needless to say that pressing Start Scan puts the process in motion. Speed varies depending on the total size of the disk you decide to scan. When it’s all done, a window pops up to display results. Green blocks let you know everything is in order, while red blocks mean a specific cluster can’t be accessed.

Last but not least, the application only does half of what you’d expect. In other words, it’s only capable of performing read operations, and although this is done not to put too much pressure on your disk drives, offers a partial result, so you won’t know if you can write.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that Ariolic Disk Scanner gets the job properly done, but only for those circumstances when reading from the drive is not required. The simple interface quickly gets you up and running, while drives are automatically detected and refreshed to reduce your overall effort. However, if you need a full check of your drives, it’s best to look for alternatives.