If we take into account that Seagate's share in the European OEM market is more than 60%, and Maxtor belongs to it, then the purpose of the utility is not so narrowly focused – it can be used to diagnose a good half of the hard drives in computers.
The program provides the user with the opportunity to determine the status of hard drives by conducting a quick scan. If a quick scan finds errors, the program can run a full test and treatment of the hard drive, during which it will try to fix the detected damage. Since most hard drive errors are logical (overheating of chips, software failure), such treatment often allows you to correct the errors found. SeaTools supports work with hard drives connected to the computer via USB, 1394, ATA (PATA/IDE), SATA and SCSI interfaces. To diagnose disks with a SCSI interface, a special, advanced mode is used, which allows access to downloading new firmware versions of the chips of these disks, as well as the ability to enable or disable their cache on the fly. The developers' website also has a DOS version of the program, which will be very useful for system administrators and technicians – it is distributed in two versions, as a program for creating a boot floppy disk, and as an ISO image for creating a boot disk, after booting from which you can test disk and restore its functionality. You can download the utility from the link: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/.
