Ariolic Disk Scanner vs GSmartControl

Ariolic Disk Scanner is a free Windows utility for checking disks for read errors that may indicate drive degradation. It scans every sector on supported media in read-only mode, shows bad clusters as an image, and lists files located on unreadable sectors. The program supports all FAT variants and NTFS. It can scan internal and external disks visible in Windows, including USB sticks, Micro SD cards, CDs, and DVDs. No installation is required, so it can run from a flash drive or another disk. Ariolic says the checks do not alter data. The utility is intended as an early warning for drives showing failure signs, rather than a repair tool. Its knowledge base says scanning does not guarantee that an underlying issue will be fixed. The product page links to a free CNET download.

GSmartControl is a graphical interface for smartctl, used to inspect drive SMART data and run tests. It displays drive identity, capabilities, attributes and device statistics, and automatically highlights anomalies. Users can enable or disable SMART and adjust global or per-drive smartctl options. Saved smartctl output can be opened as a read-only virtual device. The software supports ATA drives, including SATA and PATA, and NVMe drives, plus some devices behind USB bridges and selected RAID controllers. SCSI and SAS drives are not supported, though some information about them may appear. GSmartControl is free software under the GNU General Public License version 3. Downloads include Linux packages, Windows installers and portable archives, FreeBSD ports, macOS packages and source code. smartmontools is a runtime requirement, but official Windows packages include the required software. Useful operations require root or Administrator privileges because operating systems restrict direct hardware access. Supported systems listed include Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, macOS and Solaris; QNX support is described as untested.