Almost a decade ago, I used to buy blank CD/DVD media for keeping all my important files as backup. But things have changed so much since then. These days there is hardly anyone who depends on the optical media for backup or storage. Now everyone has one or more portable external hard drives that you can attach to your PC with the help of a USB data cable and use it just like a hard drive. But the external hard drives are also exposed to the same risks as the internal hard drives – they can develop physical or file system troubles – in both cases you could end up losing your precious data.
This is why it is vital that you keep checking your hard drives or other types of storage media using a tool like Victoria from time to time. Victoria is a free and powerful analysis and diagnostic tool for managing and repairing mounted storage drives. Not only it allows you to perform an in-depth analysis of the hard drives, but you can also check their performance and scan all the sectors or allocations for technical errors.
Needless to say, Victoria displays all the information about a storage media as soon as you select it from the list of available drives. It gives the manufacturer, model name, serial number, total storage capacity, and displays the other functions of the device – LBA, HPA, DMA, etc. You can find the health status of your storage media using the SMART data of the hard drives.
Victoria is an extremely powerful and useful tool for hard drive diagnostic and analysis. It packs so many tools in a very small program (less than 1 MB) that can be used to check the data read/write speed of the storage drives, find the health status using SMART data, run a drive scan to find bad sectors and more.
You can download Victoria from http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/Victoria.shtml.