Before I shell out money for hard disk ‘maintenance’ software, I would like to know a little about its features. Thus, questions:
1. Can Hard Disk Sentinel bypass the drive’s own error-correction firmware and have a look at the raw data?
2. Is it able to recover data from sectors/tracks that the drive has marked as bad?
3. Can it get past the drive’s preset “I can’t read that; I’m giving up”, and force further attempts to read badly worn parts of the drive surface?
We are entrusting electronic storage device manufacturers with ever-increasing parts of our lives. They want to be the ‘smooth interface’ between the user and some extremely complex devices, and this sometimes leaves the user with few options for getting at their own – corrupted – data. S.M.A.R.T. should have improved things for the end user, but instead was so broad that every manufacturer could and did implement it their own way – again locking our data away from us.
Software that is intended for HDD management should be able to bypass the manufacturer’s firewalls and allow the user to do what they need to in order to get back that video of the last time we saw grandad alive. Does this software provide such tools?