Question: I recently bought a new 1TB USB mounted external hard drive (a Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 2.0, to be exact). Before putting it into use, I would like to perform some rudimentary testing on it. Is this possible? Can anyone suggest a free software to do this? (I can use either Windows or Linux software, but prefer the latter.)
Answer: If you are talking about testing the performance of the drive, you can use HD Tach for running some low-level tests.
On the other hand, if you are looking for something to test the integrity of your drive, check out SeaTools from Seagate. You do not need to have a Seagate HDD to use this tool.