Besides hard drives, many of these software can also find out bad sectors of external hard drives, flash drives, etc. Some disk checkers can also find and fix errors that help in improving the performance of the hard drive. If a sector is responding, then it is a healthy sector and if not, then it is a bad sector. To scan hard drive, these freeware use various scanning methods like Self-Short Test, Verify, Butterfly, Quick Check, etc. These software basically scan every sector of the hard drive to find non-responding areas or bad sectors. In order to find bad sectors and errors, you need to use these hard drive bad sectors checker software.

It is beneficial to know the number of bad sectors in your hard drive as it gives you time to take backup of your data before the complete hard drive corruption. Errors of hard drives can be fixed, but bad sectors are unfixable. In most cases, the drop in performance is due to the accumulation of errors and generation of bad sectors. After a continuous use, the performance of hard drive may start to degrade.

Here is a list of best free software to check hard drive bad sectors for Windows.

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