H2testw 1.4

Overview

The main purpose of H2testw is to detect fake flash disks.

Computer hardware and peripherals tend to get faulty at times, usually due to the factor of time. After years of usage, connected devices and hardware start to slow down and have trouble performing several activities; especially if all this time they work intensively - with the main example here being the hard drives. H2testw is a powerful free software that can test USB flash disks and hard drives and report whether they have any problems currently, as well as detect fake flash disks.

Installation

H2testw has the main advantage of being portable, which means that there’s no installation required, but you only need to run the executable in order to use it.

The program contains no viruses, trojans, etc. and has no 3^rd-paty advertised software in it either.

It can run under Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Server 2008, Vista, 7, 8 (32/64-bit systems supported).

Interface

The program’s interface is very simple and old-school; no graphics and fancy buttons, only text, checkboxes, textboxes and buttons.

At the top there are two radio buttons which change the language of the program. The two available languages are German and English, and check either language will immediately changes all strings of the program to that language.

Apart from that, there’s a “Target” area, from which you can select the disk that you want to test with H2testw, as well as a “Data volume” area, where you can choose whether you want to test all available space of the device, or only a specific portion of it.

Lastly, at the bottom there are two buttons: “Write + Verify”, which initiates the full testing procedure, and “Verify”, which is the functionality of the program that can test a device if the written test data is already present in the directory.

Pros

This program is said to be one of the best ones when testing faulty drives. And that’s no coincidence, since it has a very thorough scanning technique that basically writes test data in the device, and then verifies it. If the data that was just written by the program cannot be read back, then the program reports an error.

Once you run the test, you can see the progress and the estimated time remaining. Even if the test returns no errors, a sign that the flash memory is problematic is if the estimate time is increasing instead of decreasing; this is explained easily, since the program’s data transfer is constant, so in a healthy disk the estimated time remaining should not have sudden changes unless the media is defective. Note that this does not apply to magnetic hard drives, since they are slower on the inside tracks than on the outside tracks, therefore it’s normal for the estimated time remaining to have ups and downs.

H2testw is commonly used in order to detect flash disks which have smaller capacity than what’s reported. It’s not rare for someone to buy a flash disk that reports a fake capacity from an untrusted source; and this program helps in identifying this monkey business (even though you can’t really do anything about it).

The “endless loop” feature is not used very often, since it repeats the test continuously unless you stop it manually. This is mostly used to discover sporadic data transfer issues in the disk.

Cons

No cons here.

Alternatives

Here are some decent alternatives: HD Tune (freemium), Check Flash (free), FakeFlashTest (free), HDDLife (paid), USB Flash Drive Tester (free), Flash Memory Toolkit (freemium) and Macorit Disk Scanner (free). Out of those, the best ones are HD Tune (which also has a Pro version too) FakeFlashTest and HDDLife.

Conclusion

H2testw is a very efficient utility for performing data integrity tests for hard disks, USB drives, memory cards, etc. It has only a few but very important features which make it stand above the rest.