One of the best HDD utilities is free

22 May 2007 | 18:51 BST

By Theo Valich

EVERY HARD DRIVE manufacturer usually offers some piece of software that will ease the moving of stuff between the drives, but also proves a good backup tool.

Usually, the hard drive manufacturers team up with utility makers and offer baseline features. Until now, that is.

Seagate has released a version of Disc Wizard and Maxtor's Max Blast 5, but what makes these utilities highly on the "me want" list is the fact that both are based on the OEM version of the excellent True Image app. Disc Wizard and Max Blast utilities now offer a plethora of options that give people options previously offered only by commercial applications. Disc Wizard/Max Blast feature disk drive cloning, full disk imaging, formatting drives, creating partitions, erasing all the data on the drive - for the best price of them all.

There is a grand total of 14 supported languages, and is totally free for owners of hard drives manufactured by Seagate or companies owned by Seagate. You need to have at least one drive in order for this utility to work, but worst case scenario would be using those external USB 2.0 drives by Seagate... when it comes to distribution, you can find this utility on CDs that are shipping with retail drives, or simply download the latest version.

Acronis is a well known company in this biz, but we were surprised to see both Seagate and Acronis keeping their mouths shut and not talking out loud about the co-operation. We wonder is there some agreement over keeping this cooperation silent, but Seagate missed out the fact that this hack uses Seagate drives. If you own Seagate or Maxtor hard drive, don't think - just follow our complementary L'INQs to get the software. µ

L'INQ
Seagate DiscWizard
Maxtor MaxBlast
Acronis website

© 2007 Incisive Media Investments Ltd. 2007