|
48-bit LBA Technology |
Information Only |
Reviewed: 2005-07-06 |
Written by: David Marcionek |
|
Page last updated: 2005-04-04 |
|
Source for 48-bit LBA Information «48-bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA) is a technology which extends the capacity of IDE ATA/ATAPI devices beyond a previous limit of 137.4 GB. This limit applies to IDE ATA/ATAPI devices only and not to SCSI interface devices. The original design specification for the ATA interface only provided 28-bits with which to address the devices. This meant that a hard disk could only have a maximum of 268,435,456 sectors of 512 bytes of data thus limiting the ATA interface to a maximum of 137.4 gigabytes. With 48-bit addressing the limit is 144 petabytes (144,000,000 gigabytes).»
|
|
|
Darik's Boot and Nuke |
License: GNU GPL – Open Source
|
Reviewed: 2005-07-06
|
Version: 1.0.5 – Dated: 2005-04-16
|
Windows: 3.1, 3.5, NT 4.0, 2000, XP; DOS
|
File Size: 1.5 MB
|
|
«Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) is a self-contained boot floppy that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction. «Platform Support: Hardware – DBAN has all available SCSI disk drivers. DBAN has all available IDE disk drivers and extended chipset tuning support. DBAN runs on all 32-bit x86-class computers (Athlon, Pentium, and others) with at least 8 megs of memory. If you find an incompatible machine, then please report it. Software – DBAN supports all Microsoft platforms and securely destroys FAT, VFAT, and NTFS filesytems. DBAN also supports all unix platforms and securely destroys ReiserFS, EXT, and UFS filesystems. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, BeOS, QNX.»
|
|
|
DirectDisk |
License: GNU GPL – Open Source |
Reviewed: 2005-07-06 |
Version: 1.0 – Dated: 2003-02-15 |
Windows: 9x, NT, 2000, XP |
File Size: 320 KB |
|
«DirectDisk allow you to directly access physical sectors from floppy, hard disks, logical volumes and CDRoms. It is useful when you are going to manually create boot disks, or if you want to backup or edit them. It is an extremely simple and easy to use program: simply select the drive, the sector number to read/write and press Read/Write. You can choose logical disks or even physical, so you can access master boot sectors too. The integrated HexEditor allow you to easily manipulate data in it.»
|
|
|
Disk Checker |
License: Shareware – $15.00 |
Reviewed: 2005-07-27 |
Version: 3.1 – Dated: 2005-07-09 |
Windows: 9x, Me, NT, 2000, XP |
File Size: 1.19 MB |
|
«Disk Checker is a full-featured disk diagnostics and repairs tool with backup ability. This program includes two separate methods of checking: with using files and direct access to disk surface. The direct access method is much faster and is perfect for large number of small files. Now Disk Checker can repair error in FAT or phisical defect. In first case lost or cross-linked cluster(s) will be fixed. In second case all readable data will placed in new cluster(s) and defective cluster(s) will marked as bad in FAT. «A disk image is a file that contains all the disk data, such as boot sector, files, directory and file structure. The produced disk image files compatible with image files produced by other disk copy utilities (Diskcopy, WinImage, DiskDupe,etc). «This is a easy-in-use program: command line, logging and dedicated item in Windows shell context menu are supported.»
|
|
|
Disk Investigator |
License: Freeware |
Reviewed: 2005-07-06 |
Version: 1.31 – Dated: 2003-11-23 |
Windows: 9x, Me, NT, 2000, XP |
File Size: 347 KB |
|
«Disk Investigator helps you to discover all that is hidden on your computer hard disk. It can also help you to recover lost data. Display the true drive contents by bypassing the operating system and directly reading the raw drive sectors. View and search raw directories, files, clusters, and system sectors. Verify the effectiveness of file and disk wiping programs. Undelete previously deleted files. For all of FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS file systems.»
|
|
|
DiskMon |
License: Freeware |
Reviewed: 2005-07-06 |
Version: 2.01 – Dated: 2003-12-11 |
Windows: NT 4.0, 2000, XP, 2003 |
File Size: 57 KB |
|
«DiskMon is an application that logs and displays all hard disk activity on a Windows system. You can also minimize DiskMon to your system tray where it acts as a disk light, presenting a green icon when there is disk-read activity and a red icon when there is disk-write activity. «Read and write offsets are presented in terms of sectors (512 bytes). Events can be either timed for their duration (in microseconds), or stamped with the absolute time that they were initiated. The History Depth dialog can be used to specify the maximum number of records that will be kept in the GUI (0 signifies no limit).»
|
|
|
DiskPatch |
License: Shareware – Std $49.95 |
Reviewed: 2005-07-06 |
Version: 2.1 – Dated: 2005-02-24 |
OS: DOS (Bootdiskette included) |
File Size: 1.12 MB |
|
«DiskPatch is a professional DOS based data recovery utility that recovers data by repairing corrupt disk structures, like the partition tables, 'in-place'. DiskPatch is designed to tackle the most common issues that prevent you from accessing your data; a corrupt MBR (Master Boot Record), corrupt partition tables, accidentally deleted partitions, corrupt boot sectors, and 'bad' sectors. Corruption of the MBR, partition tables and boot sectors account for the majority of the problems that lead to 'mass data loss'; situations where an entire drive or partition can't be accessed. «You can fix these problems yourself using DiskPatch! DiskPatch automatically repairs damaged, corrupt or missing partition tables and boot sectors. Fast. Simple. Safe. To make recovery from future disasters even easier, DiskPatch allows you to back up important disk structures like the MBR, partition tables and boot sectors.»
|
|
|
DiskPie Pro |
License: By subscription* |
Reviewed: 2005-05-15 |
Version: 1.0.4 – Dated: 2005-03-07 |
Windows: 98, ME, 2000, XP |
File Size: 1.5 MB |
|
Clean Up Your Hard Drive
«With its customizable pie charts, you can visually find your overweight folders, files, and even see what filetypes are eating up your precious drive space. Once you've found your biggest offenders, DiskPie Pro will help you clean your drive – and it'll even be a watchdog, quietly monitoring the disk (or networked drive) in the background so you can keep it clean, orderly, and more important, fast and efficient. This new version is a complete rewrite of our original DiskPie 2 utility.» *NOTE: The PC Magazine Utility Library is now available by subscription only – $19.95 Yearly.
|
|
|
Drive Manager |
License: Freeware |
Reviewed: 2005-07-19 |
Version: 3.14 – Dated: 2005-07-19 |
Windows: 98, Me, 2000, XP |
File Size: 370 KB |
|
«Drive Manager is a small and useful tool that makes it easy to retrieve drive information for all your drives at a glance. It runs as a standalone EXE file and displays Label, Type, Size, Used, Available, Format, Serial number and Percentage free for each local and removable drive. The information is refreshed every 20 seconds – double-clicking opens the drive in Windows Explorer. Drive Manager also allows you to create a substitute drive letter for a local folder, and to hide drives from Windows Explorer. «This utility has been created to not require an installation to run. It can be carried around on a thumb drive, CD or DVD and then run on different machines without the need to be installed first. There are no runtime libraries required to be installed first.»
|
|
|
DriveWizard |
License: Shareware – $29.95 |
Reviewed: 2005-07-06 |
Version: 3.15 – Dated: 2005-06-20 |
Windows: 9x, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 |
File Size: 4.87 MB |
Requires: Registration for trial |
«Powerful solution for Data Migration (hard disk drive cloning and upgrading) and Backup. Easy to install and use, DriveWizard works in Windows environment with a user friendly interface. In just few easy steps, you can upgrade your hard drive to a higher capacity hard drive. DriveWizard creates an exact mirror of your hard drive. «DriveWizard copies every single byte of data from your hard drive. If the source hard drive is bootable, then your upgraded/ mirrored hard drive is bootable as well. DriveWizard automatically defragments the data before writing it into your destination drive, allowing the applications to run faster on your new drive. You may schedule unattended automatic backups and you may restore your hard drive in case of a disaster.»
|
|
|
Emsa DiskCheck |
License: Freeware |
Reviewed: 2005-07-06 |
Version: 1.0.57 – Dated: 2004-03-25 |
Windows: 9x, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 |
File Size: 187 KB |
|
Disk Checking and Benchmarking Tool
«Emsa Disk Check is a dual-purpose utility, for disk checking (prescan and full disk reading) and also benchmarking. What it does, is scanning/reading the entire contents of a disk (CD, DVD or hard drive; or even floppy) and show any read errors that may appear, but also show drive speed information, progress statistics etc. It was designed with simplicity in mind, but usefulness for the user. Emsa DiskCheck has the following main features and characteristics: ¤ useful to quicky and fully scan removable disks like CD, DVD for surface defects like disk scratch problems, bad CD-R/RW DVD-R/RW writes, etc.; ¤ can check CD-ROM, DVD, hard disks, even floppy disks; ¤ useful for benchmarking a drive, be it CD, DVD or HDD; ¤ shows 'locked' files on disks; ¤ useful speed comparison (shows the 'X' multiplier speed comparison with CDs and DVDs) with possibility of switching in CD/DVD 'X' mode; ¤ it scans/reads a disk fully until completion or user stop, at the maximal speed available; ¤ reports progress, statistics (files, folders, time elapsed, estimated time remaining); ¤ reports any errors encountered (error count and log entry for each); ¤ prescan accesses the disk table of contents and computes file information, showing the total number of files and folders and total space on disk before running the full scan.»
|
|
|
EnableBigLba |
License: Freeware |
Reviewed: 2005-07-06 |
File Size: 156 KB |
|
«EnableBigLba will test your system for 'EnableBigLba' in the Windows registry on your system to determine whether it is defined or needs to be set for 48-bit LBA support. If EnableBigLba needs to be set, the tool does not do it automatically. It will give you the option to set it manually with the click of a button.»
|
|
|
Hard Disk Indicator |
License: Freeware |
Reviewed: 2005-07-06 |
Version: 1.4 – Dated: 2005-05-25 |
Windows: 2000 and XP only |
File Size: 180 KB |
|
«Is your PC out of sight? Add your hard disk's LED to your system tray.»
|
|
|
Hard Disk Size Barriers |
Information Only |
Reviewed: 2005-07-06 |
«One of the most common problems people have with hard disks, especially when trying to add a new hard disk to an older system, is the frustration of finding that not all of the hard disk is actually accessible. This is almost always due to BIOS and operating system issues that are a result of short-sighted planning done by the people that invented hard disk structures, access routines and operating systems many years ago. Fortunately, there are now solutions to most of these problems. This section takes a complete look at these issues so you can finally understand what these barriers are all about. «Each of the barriers is described in its page title with a name that briefly summarizes the reason for the barrier, and also the capacity figures generally associated with that barrier.»
|
|
|
HD Speed |
License: Freeware |
Reviewed: 2005-07-06 |
Version: 1.4.2.50 – Dated: 2005-05-28 |
Windows: NT4, 2000, XP, 2003 |
File Size: 39.3 KB |
|
«Measures both sustained and burst data transfer rates of your hard disks, cd/dvd-roms and floppy. Realtime graphical display.»
|
|
|
HD Tach |
License: Free for non-commercial use |
Reviewed: 2005-07-06 |
Version: 3.0.1.0 – Dated: 2004-07-07 |
Windows: 2000, XP |
File Size: 1.03 MB |
|
«HD Tach will test the sequential read, random access and interface burst speeds of your attached storage device (hard drive, flash drive, removable drive, etc). All drive technologies such as SCSI, IDE/ATA, 1394, USB, SATA and RAID are supported. Test results from HD Tach can be used to confirm manufacturer specs, analyze your system for proper performance, and compare your performance with others. HD Tach is very easy to use, quick, and presents data in easy to read graphs, including the ability to compare two storage devices on screen at the same time for easy analysis.»
|
|
|
HD Tune |
|