Ariolic Disk Scanner vs ValiDrive

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.

ValiDrive is a free Windows utility for quickly spot-checking USB mass storage drives for deliberately missing storage. It tests 576 evenly spaced locations with random data, checking whether each location can store and retrieve information. Before testing a region, it reads the original contents and rewrites them afterward, restoring what was there. The utility detects internal RAM caching and adjusts transfer size when needed to bypass it. A drive map labels each tested location as validated, read error, write error, or no storage. The final report summarizes read and write access times with minimum, maximum, average, median, and variance values. The maker describes this as a quick, cursory check rather than a comprehensive deep test of storage media. While running, it briefly checks for updates through an anonymous DNS query but does not update itself automatically. Listed releases are v1.0.0 from October 6, 2023 and v1.0.1 from October 8, 2023.