B&W Rev A - Is it really that bad?

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.

I am totally comfortable with DOS, but unfortunately don't have a PC. Thanks for the suggestion. The PCI SCSI or IDE card totally seems like the way to go with these things.

Assuming I even get one.