Portable Drive Manager

excellent
key review info
application features
  • Hard disk serial number
  • (13 more, see all...)

Taking care of all the drives installed on a computer can be a pretty daunting task for many users. Generally the products that asses the state of the disk do not come cheap and it doesn't happen too often for them to be intuitive enough for every user to feel comfortable working with them.

And yet there are some utilities capable of helping you in monitoring the disk drives and more by making a fix here and there, for free. Alex Nolan's Drive Manager is a nifty looking utility that can assist you in taking a minimum care of your disk drives. Besides the fact that it is free it is also portable as it needs no installation.

The interface of the latest version fits perfectly in Windows Vista and is not discordant with the looks of XP either. The application is perfect if you have lots of drives installed on your system (mapped drives, memory sticks, smart media, CD/DVD ROMs, etc.). It'll make your life easier in managing all of them.

All sort of information is displayed in the colorful window of Drive Manager and all you need is a glance to learn about the free space available on the partitions. Main application window displays all the drives available, regardless if they are virtual drives, removable disks or partitions of the local disks. Drive Manager will see them all and display all information it can gather on them.

The columns available show the drive letter, label (if available), type of the drive (local disk, CD/DVD drive, removable disk, network drive or disk), total size of the drive, used and available space, format of the partition, percentage of free space as well as details on the vendor and product ID. All these just by starting the application. Should some changes occur Drive Manager refreshes and displays it every 30 seconds. Also, if you are anxious to see it on the spot you can refresh the view manually.

At the bottom of the window Drive Manager comes equipped with a number of five filters to display only the drives of a certain kind. You can enable or disable the view of local drives, CD/DVD, removable ones, network drives or those that are not mounted yet. This way you can focus only on the partitions of interest (there is no need of analyzing a drive which is not mounted and having it in the list would only be de-focusing the view from important drives).

From the interface of Drive Manager you can access any of the drives displayed with absolutely no problem via Windows Explorer. Also, CD/DVD drives can be ejected and loaded with a simple push of a button.

Hiding the drives from view is another feature of the application. It can hide the partitions from Windows Explorer. The downside is that only Windows Explorer is tricked by Drive Manager and you have to restart the computer for the changes to enter into force. Making them visible again is possible from the program as well because it will still display them (take a look in Visibility column to see which ones are hidden or look for those marked with blue).

Properties window in Drive Manager is exactly the same with the one provided by the operating system, so the options in this case will be according to installed OS.

Toolbar features an option called "Subst". It is the same as the "subst" command in DOS; it will create a virtual drive from any folder available on any partition of your system. The feature is particularly useful as it offers easy access to deep buried folders. All you have to do is set the letter for the new drive and the path to the folder to be mounted.

Drive Manager's capabilities extend to providing information on file system flags for each available drive. More than this, you can also perform a brief benchmark on local, CD/DVD and removable drives on your system. The operation will not take long and you will learn about the read speed. Users have a say on the size of the test file and the block size.

But these are just little league compared to the reading of S.M.A.R.T. attributes from the disk. This information is restricted to local drives as they are the only ones under the monitor of the sensors and Drive Manager will show you the temperature of the disk, model number, serial number, firmware revision and the exact size in bytes. Everything else depends on the motherboard and hard disks of your system.

The drive fixing utility incorporated in Drive Manager is Check Disk (CHKDSK). It can fix some of the detected errors, display all file names, check the disk only if dirty and scan the drives. It may not be much but it will definitely flag any errors that may be on it so that you can take further actions.

Besides being a nice looking application Drive Manager is truly handy, especially that it can pop up from an USB disk. You can hide certain drives from Windows Explorer and view S.M.A.R.T. attributes. It is a handy tool for fixing minor drive problems or at least detecting them before an aftermath takes place.

The Good

First of all it is free and comes with lots of interesting options, easy to access even by the uninitiated users.

The interface is gorgeous and the fact that it comes with some many options (just check out drives' context menu), considering the size of the application, only brings value to the program.

The Bad

I wish it could be password protected. Also, minimizing to system tray and being able to alert the user when certain thresholds are exceeded would increase its value a lot.

Drives are hidden only in Windows Explorer; a different file manager is not at all affected by Drive Manager's trick.

There are lots of Windows utilities available in the application: NT Backup/Restore, Disk Defragmenter, Search, Properties, Explore, CHKDSK, etc.

The Truth

Though it may not seem much Drive Manager is definitely full of surprising options. The context menu in drive window contains all the options of the program.

It can mount folders into a virtual drive, hide them from Windows Explorer, verify their integrity with CHKDSK, show the S.M.A.R.T. attributes, activate Windows Backup and Restore utility and drive defragmenter, etc.

Drive Manager integrates lots of Windows tools, but it incorporates them nicely and takes only the best. I guess this is its major flaw.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:

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user interface 5
features 4
ease of use 5
pricing / value 5


final rating 5
Editor's review
excellent
 
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