Seagate SeaTools

Taking care of your drives ensures that they will perform for years to come, and serve you and your data well. However, that does not exclude data loss events from occurring, but it's nice to be proactive. 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.

Drive manufacturers often have their own software to offer to help with that, and Seagate SeaTools is an offering from one such manufacturers. 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.

Testing your drive shouldn't be a complicated process — after all, most of it should be automatic. 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. If you want to be a little more particular, you can opt for a quick or extended test. The latter option conducts a more thorough examination of your drive to look for bad sectors and other such signs of failure.

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. It's worth backing up everything before proceeding with this option.

Users can manage how their drive handles blocks of data via the LBA option. 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.

Users can format their drive through this solution. 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.

You can also create a bootable Linux USB drive of this software. Through it, users can manage and format their drives without any intervention from their operating system.

Seagate SeaTools is a drive utility worth considering for drive-related duties: it can recognize a faulty drive, format your storage, and more.

Seagate SeaTools is part of these download collections: HDD Managers