MHDD

Analyzing the status of your hard disk drives and getting accurate information about its mechanical components requires a highly specialized software. With support for the most common interfaces, namely SATA, IDE and SCSI, a very lightweight application comes to help you. Called MHDD, the program runs from a Command Prompt instance and if needed, it will emulate USB and read it like SCSI in order to inspect and assess USB storage devices.

Although it may seem quite easy to use, you should be careful when working with this tool because it is not intended for just about anyone. In fact, it requires you to have solid knowledge insofar as HDD functioning is concerned.

With the help of this utility, you can perform a variety of maintenance tasks that will help improve the performance of the drives. MHDD can show you the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) attributes and it works with various types of controllers.

The software is available even in bootable image format for floppy disks and CD-ROMs and is able to help you carry out low-level format operations as well as repair bad sectors, if any are found on your hard drive.

Using MHDD it is possible to perform in-depth scans, erasing the entire drive or some of its sectors, modifying the drive size and even locking the HDD with a password of your own.

In case you consider your hard drive to be rather noisy, thanks to this tool you will be able to enjoy a bit more silence as it can increase the seek time to cut some of the noise. This may decrease the overall performance of the HDD, but it might help prolong its life.

To sun it all up, MHDD offers quite a lot of possibilities, all well cloaked under the appearance of an average command-line utility. It is not by any measure common and even if using it will require a bit of reading in advance, the results will at least meet your highest expectations.