Disk Drive Administrator 10.02

Overview

You should always make sure that your data is protected from unauthorized access. One way to do that is to lock the computer’s storage devices so that only you can access their contents. How are you going to do that? With the help of Disk Drive Administrator. This application not only can hide and lock USB flash disks, but also CDs, DVDs, external hard drives, memory cards and basically all types of storage devices.

Installation

Once you launch the installer, you must go through a few easy installation steps that don’t have any advanced settings. In order to complete the installation of the program, you must restart your computer after the process is complete.

No harmful software is included in the setup package (e.g. viruses, trojans, etc.); no 3^rd party advertised software is distributed along with the main program either.

Supported operating systems are Windows NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7 and 8 (32/64-bit).

Interface

The program’s interface is a bit… repetitive, basically. In fact, it takes a lot of space in the screen when it could be quite smaller. In the main window you can see multiple areas, each one corresponding to a drive. In each area, the drive’s letter is shown along with 3 checkboxes: Hide, Lock and Disallow Autorun. Therefore, we have 26 different areas with the same settings, just for different drive letters. Anyways, apart from them we have two other similar areas (“Disallow Autorun for Drive Types” and “External Drive Write Protection”) with a few other options, as well as a horizontal sidebar on the right side with many buttons.

Pros

The program’s main functionality consists of 3 operations: Hide, Lock and Disallow Autorun. Each connected drive in the computer, locally or in a network, can either be locked, hidden or prevented from autorunning. The options for each drive are saved individually, meaning that you can protect multiple drives at the same time.

The program can be protected with a password (as it should obviously do) so that access to it is forbidden to anyone without it.

Disk Drive Administrator can also disallow autorun for different drive types: HDDs, USB/floppy, CD/DVD and RAM Disks. Additionally, it can write-protect external removable drives (USD flash drives, mass storage devices, etc.).

Cons

Well, first of all the program takes up a big portion of the screen unnecessarily. The developer could easily replace the areas of the hard drives with a drop down button for choosing the drive and making the corresponding settings.

Another important issue is that in the product’s website, the download link that refers to Disk Drive Administrator is wrong and downloads another, irrelevant application (1st Security Agent with Advanced Desktop Shield). This needs to be fixed.

Also, there’s no information as to what the program’s level of security is.

Alternatives

Some other software similar to this one are Axcrypt (free), AES Crypt (free), USB Vault (free), Easy File Locker (free), Windows BitLocker (comes with Windows) and Jetico BestCrypt (paid).

Conclusion

Even though Disk Drive Administrator does a good job in protecting storage drives, it could certainly get improved.