HDTune - Hard Drive Benchmarking and Information

HD Tune is a hard disk utility that can burst speed test, temperature, reference and information. You can use it to measure the raw performance of your drive, including transfer rate, burst rate, access time and much more. In addition, it provides detailed information about the features supported disk, as well as the current temperature, SMART information (if available) and an error scanner.

HD Tune is a Hard Disk utility which has the following functions:

• Benchmark: measures the performance
• Info: shows detailed information
• Health: checks the health status by using SMART
• Error Scan: scans the surface for errors
• Temperature display

HD Tune may also work with other storage devices such as memory cards, USB sticks, iPods, etc.
Users reported that this software is able to find bad sectors on the HDD, when chkdsk fails to locate and report them.

You can make this utility portable to run it from your USB Drive, but software will right some registry settings. If you leave the default options/configurations intact (at the options, just DO NOT click OK), the only registry entries left will be the regular entries for recently used documents, recent files, MRU, etc. But these cannot be avoided because they are Microsoft generated, and their impact is insignificant.

Download the installer and extract to a folder of your choice. The application files are located in the {app} subfolder. Copy the folder content to the desired location and launch HDTune.exe. If needed, you can uninstall the utility from your HDD. Anyway, I have loaded both versions for your use. You can choose which one you want.

Operating Systems: Vista/ Win2k/ WinXP

Developers Website: http://www.hdtune.com/

Source: http://webfreebies4u.blogspot.com/2008/08/hard-drive-benchmarking-and-information.html