Drive Manager 4.17

Overview

If you’re the sort of person who has multiple hard drives or removable disks connected to your PC, then invariably every now and then you’d find yourself looking for drive information for each disk or perform several diagnostic tasks. Drive manager attempts to make the process simpler by providing an all in one solution that gives you an overview of all your connected drives.

Installation

The setup package is only 1MB in size and takes a few seconds to download. After this you can just execute the file to open the software directly. There is no installation process or anything like that. Your downloaded file acts as your source to execute the software. There is nothing else that is bundled with Drive Manager like toolbars or other system diagnostic software. Drive Manager supports all major versions of Windows but it's not compatible with Mac OSX or Linux.

Interface

Drive Manager has a very simple yet very intuitive interface. Like many other similar software, this one doesn’t overload you with too many options or menus. Advance users will find themselves right at home with Drive Manager and all the options it presents where as even the amateurs will find it relatively easy getting to know the various options and the drive information given. Everything is laid out in a neat and clean interface and is quite pleasing to the eyes.

Pros

Drive Manager is completely free of cost and provides you with pretty much all the information you’ll need. For each individual drive you can check the volume number, serial number, file system, product ID, revision, disk size and several other pieces of information. All this is refreshed every 10 seconds automatically insuring what you see in the most up to date data. You can also hide any hard disk from appearing in Windows explorer and make it visible again whenever you please. Similarly drives that are hidden using other software can also be seen through Drive Manager. A built in benchmark utility tests each hard disk for read speed and then displays the result in MB/sec. It also gives you the ability to map or disconnect network drives. Optical media is also fully supported and you can benchmark your CD or DVD. Furthermore you can also analyze them for bad sectors or other errors.

Cons

While Drive Manager does provide you with most of the information that an average user needs; for more advance needs you’ll have to rely on other software. It doesn’t have a built in drive scanner or defragmenter and relies on the Windows one which is pretty average. The built in benchmark utility is extremely basic giving very little information

Alternatives

The best alternative to Drive Manager is Windows own built in drive manager, which is accessed through Admin Tools. However it doesn't offer such a rich feature set as Drive Manager.

Conclusion

Drive Manager is one of the best free hard disk management software available. If you’re not a demanding user and only want the basic information and tools, then Drive Manager is a must have software.