Hitachi hard drive bad sector repair social advice

Disk Checker is a hard drive monitoring/repairing tool for Windows. It is even more of a suite of tools that allow you to scan your hard disks for errors. Disc Checker will even tell you what files are located on sectors with errors, so you can delete or maybe save them. Furthermore, the application has the ability to create disc images in an array of formats.

Hitachi Align Tool is a Windows utility that is used to re-allign the partition.
Most modern operating systems have been designed to work efficiently with Advanced Format drives. For optimum performance, it is important to ensure that the drive is partitioned correctly and that data is written in 4K blocks by both the operating system, and the application.

HDTune is a free, basic but useful maintenance tool. It can scan your hard drives and give you quite a bit of useful information about the state of the hardware and how well (or not) the operating system can access the data on them. The basic HDTune app is free, but you can get an additional set of features for a small price if you purchase the "Pro" version.