SpinRite and Secure Erase will require a non-USB interface. So those are out of the question. HDD Regenerator should work fine through your USB 3.0 interface. If not, it will work through USB 2.0, just slower of course. Spinrite may try a few more bit patterns and have a more colorful control panel than HDD Regenerator. But Spinrite is older and behind the times when it comes to newer disks. SpinRite is really from the old school days of when a low-level-format really meant a low-level-format. SpinRite has not been updated since 2004. HDD Regenerator is current tech and “better aware” of modern disks. So I would go with that.
You can try CHKDSK first, (with the option to scan and recover bad sectors) it comes with your o/s therefore is free. Can’t hurt other than taking some time. Chkdsk looks at the sectors logically and marks them bad (if they’re bad) in NTFS metafiles. This is so the OS knows not to use them. This is different than the the disk’s surface defect list, which is made at the factory and periodically updated in the field. WD disks check for weak and bad sectors in the background, irregardless of the file system mapping, and attempt to relocate them. This is standard stuff. Been that way for years. And from time to time an internal scan may get hung up on a weak sector. And the drive keeps trying to work with that marginal sector over and over again. This problem manifests itself as unexplained disconnects, or slow peformance, or hang-ups & lock-ups.
Usually when a disk is asked to read a file or sector, the disk’s internal error checking automatically remaps bad sectors to the G-list. Grown defect list. Surface defects that show up later as the disk is used by the consumer. There is also a P-list, the Permanent defect list, this is done at the factory. This stuff basically transparent to the o/s.
The next choice will be HDD Regenerator.
HDD Regenerator doesn’t pay attention to any NTFS bad sector mappings. Or NTFS at all for that matter. It goes through all the sectors and turns off the disk’s internal hardware-based error checking (so to speak) and writes a number of patterns when it encounters a weak sector or delayed sector. This sometimes fixes a slow or bad sector, it all depends on what caused the problem in the first place!
Other than HDD Regenerator and DRevitalize I know of no other sector refreshers. Everything else is now on the professional level and beyond your price range.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chkdsk
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314835/en-us#/
http://www.dposoft.net/hdd.html
You know… When I work with a customer that has a failing disk; I advise them to simply grab their files, whatever they can, and RMA the defective disk. If they want to pay me for digging into a drive, or trying to repair it, or do data recovery on it that’s fine by me. I always recommend backups as best practice and to treat the disk (HDD or SDD) as a black box. This way time isn’t wasted dabbling in minutiae.
