Drive Manager -- when Windows Explorer isn't enough

Hard drives, memory card readers, DVDs and Blu-rays, network drives, removable disks and more: even a budget PC can have a host of storage options available at any one time. If you find you have trouble managing these with Explorer, though, then the free, portable Drive Manager has plenty of tools to help.

These start by presenting the key drive basics on a single opening screen, so just about everything you might need is available at a glance. There’s the drive volume name and type, for instance; network path; file system; capacity and space free; vendor or product name (useful for identifying which USB drive you’ve connected), and more.

Need more low-level details? The Disk Info button reveals a drive’s device name (\Device\HarddiskVolume1), its bytes per sector and sectors per cluster, the partition number and type and in-depth information on the file system. A built-in SMART checker lists attributes such as drive temperature and the number of seek errors, for compatible devices, which can highlight upcoming drive crashes. And there are other tools to scan your drive for errors, and even benchmark them for speed (although the latter seemed extremely unreliable in our tests, and isn’t going to replace a real benchmarking tool any time soon).

Drive Manager isn’t just about passive reporting, though. You can also use it to hide a drive from Explorer (though you must restart the system for this to take effect). A Subset option allows you to create virtual drives which actually point a particular path on your hard drive. And there are tools to safely dismount a USB drive, connect or disconnect a network drive, lock a DVD drive door, and more.

We did notice one oddity here. When we first ran Drive Manager, our test PC had a DVD movie in one of its drives, and for some reason the program took an absolute age to load (we thought it had locked up), and when it was finally running some features still didn’t work quite as we expected.

This may have been some odd issue specific to our setup, though. And even here, once the DVD was removed everything worked just fine. So if you’re looking for an easy way to find out more about your PC drives, then we’d still recommend Drive Manager: the program is compact, its portability is a real convenience, and the tool comes packed with useful features and functionality.

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