USB Drive Letter Manager

Your Windows operating system is configured to run in a certain way, but more tech savvy users enjoy taking over control in certain areas.   Let’s take, for instance, the way the OS assigns letters to removable drives you connect to the PC. By default, a newly detected device you insert in the USB drive is automatically associated to the first available letter.

I must say there is a way to go around this and assign a permanent letter to an external drive via the Control Panel, but a much more convenient solution is provided by USBDLM, which stands for USB Drive Letter Manager.

USB Drive Letter Manager runs in the background as a Windows service, providing a way to control what drive letter gets assigned to connected removable drives. Users that are already logged on don’t require administrator rights to carry out the desired modifications, which is a plus.

Possible conflicts that might occur (usually on older Windows editions) between connected USB drives and network or subst drives are automatically solved: the USBDLM service identifies newly connected drives and checks to see whether the assigned letter is used by network drives for the currently logged user.

Executing the “_edit-ini.cmd” file creates or opens the configuration file of the USBDLM service. The resulting INI file grants you access to the application’s behavior, making it possible, for example, to set default drive letters for USB drives or configure USBDLM to prevent certain letters from being assigned to local drives.

Additional options allow you to prioritize certain letters, hide or remove a certain drive, or even configure specific conditions to be met for assigning certain letters to a drive.

The drive letter assignment algorithm can be controlled with the USBDLM service, independently of the user’s privileges. Defining new default letters for removable drives is possible with USBDLM, but configuring it requires you to work with an INI configuration file, which might seem like a drawback for less tech savvy users.