Drives Monitor

Drives Monitor is a handy Windows widget that provides you with information at a glance regarding your hard drives. Thus, you can view the hard drive status and monitor disk activity without installing other third party application.

The gadget comprises information about each connected physical or logical hard disks, such as the total, used and free disk space (in GB and percentages) and the disk file system type (NTFS, FAT etc.). Clicking on the drive letter allows opens a flyout window where you can view detailed information about the physical drive model, capacity, type, the number of partitions, cylinders, sectors and more.

You can visualize the disk activity in percentages, but also monitor the real-time transfer evolution using the built-in graphs. The read and the write speed (in bytes per second) are also displayed, together with the total read and written data for the current session.

All this information is also monitored for any removable drives that you connect to your computer. The gadget includes an 'Eject' button that allows you to safely release the USB device.

If the free space is very low, the disk space usage bar turns red, thus letting you know about this issue and take the appropriate measures.

Excluding drives from monitoring, changing the refresh rate and choosing what information to display (for instance, you can hide the graphics or the read / write counters) are other advantages that the application comes with. Its interface is fully customizable, enabling you to modify the graph drawing style, change the gadget size, opacity and the color of each element to match your desktop theme.

The gadget offers easy access to disk contents, as you can open a drive in Windows Explorer by simply clicking on the background.

Although it is a simple and lightweight sidebar gadget, Drives Monitor provides you with all the necessary tools for monitoring your hard disks status and activity.