To my knowledge, HDAT2 does it at the firmware level, I don't know about HD Toolkit, having never used it myself.

It might be just me, but I feel that PCs are way better at disk diagnostics than Macs are - reason being that PCs have a wider range of utilities that interact with the drive at a physical level vs. Mac utilities which operate at a logical level e.g DiskWarrior, Disk Utility.