Macrorit Disk Scanner vs ValiDrive

Macrorit Disk Scanner performs surface tests to find bad sectors on storage devices. It can scan a whole disk, a partition, free space or a selected area. Healthy sectors appear green and errors red, and results can be saved to a chosen location as a readable log. The Free Edition scans one disk on Windows. Pro + Edition costs $18.95, paid once for one computer and adds simultaneous multiple-disk scanning and a report when scanning finishes. Unlimited Edition costs $99.95, paid once, covers an unlimited company license, supports Windows Server and includes multiple-disk scanning. A portable edition can run from a USB drive to scan offline disks. Listed supported storage includes HDDs, SSDs, hardware RAID, USB and external drives, flash drives, memory cards and other devices. Requirements include Windows, an x86-compatible 500 MHz CPU, 512 MB RAM and 100 MB disk space. Macrorit says it was founded at the end of 2012 and identifies itself as part of Bada Technology Co., Ltd.

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.