How To Use a Hard Drive Diagnostic Utility using Hitachi Drive Fitness Tool

It's good practice to make sure your mechanical hard drive is in optimal functioning order. With the help of hard drive utility applications we can verify if said hard drive's are an imminent threat to the system or if they are on the verge of giving up making it a good option to backup data before it fails. This tutorial will show you how to sue a Hard Disk drive utility to diagnose it for any errors. For the sake of this tutorial we're going to be using Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test tool which is applicable on drives outside of Hitachi like Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and the likes.

■Download the utility from this link. If the link doesn't work please type www.hgst.com/support/hard-drive-support/downloads into your browsers address bar.




■Once saved to a location of your choice, extract the contents of the compressed file.




■In the extracted folder, right click Setup.exe and Run as Administrator



following the instructions to proceed by agreeing on the license agreement and clicking on next.

■In the installation directory, right click WinDFT and Run as Administrator




■The application windows should show a lower pane with all the connected drives.




■If they aren't shown then you can click on Scan



Do note: The primary Boot drive will not be shown in this window. If a particular drive that is connected isn't supported then a message will appear.

■Click on the boxes to the left of the pane and click on Quick Test or Ext Test. The Ext refers to Extended which as it's name implies will require more time for a thorough analysis of the hard drive in question.




■Once the diagnostic tools run is complete it should show a Pass or Fail remark as the final report.



Do note: If the Fail remark is seen it's enough grounds to initiate an RMA with the seller or manufacturer.

■You can also try using additional utilities included within the utility by clicking on Utilities




■In the new window you are greeted with tools to help in removing your data in case of privacy concerns if you're RMA'ing or if you'd like to spend more time testing the suspect hard drive.




■Once you're done, you can exit the application by clicking on Close at the top left hand corner of the window.