System - Storage (44)

USB Flash Tools is a toolkit that provides several functions for flash memory, including SD or Compact Flash cards and USB thumb drives. The program helps verify reported capacity, backup and restore of a drive (with optional compression), and securely erase the contents. A variety of secure erase methods are available including free space or whole-drive wipe using either basic (zero out / pseudorandom) or high-security standards (like DoD).

Note: While more secure, more passes are progressively slower and can reduce the life of the flash memory drive.

Disk Thruput Tester (DiskTT) is a benchmarking tool analyzing the throughput of any disk. This is important because your actual disk performance is determined, not only by the speed of your hard drive as measured by most disk benchmarks, but also by the main board chipset, AHCI/UDMA/PIO mode, RAID configuration, CPU speed, RAM size, and the quality of drivers.

The program measures sequential read/write and random access speeds in megabytes/sec. You can set the size of the test file, the folder on the target disk to which test data will be written, cache settings, etc. Existing data on the target disk is not affected.

NTFS Permissions Tools is an easy-to-use way to modify, backup, and restore the security settings of files and folders in the NTFS filesystem. The program is faster and more intuitive than the default Windows management interface.

NOTE: Main site offline, linking to softpedia and archive.org (thanks emoreau).

H2testw allows you to test storage devices for one of a variety of possible defects or errors. It is particularly useful for detecting mislabeled / fake flash memory devices, looking at the actual versus reported capacity.

Note that the author recommends backing up the content on the device before running H2testw.

FAT32 Format lets you get around the 32GB limit that Windows XP imposes when trying to format a FAT32 volume (though it can read FAT32 volumes larger than 32GB just fine). It is able to format a FAT32 volume up to the maximum limit of 2TB.

SSD-Z provides a tabbed interface with diagnostics, analysis, and benchmark tools for your solid state drive. You can view S.M.A.R.T. status, partition layout, NAND, controller, and more.

Alternatively, SSD-Z Portable is also available.

Simplified Virtual Floppy Drive (VFD) mounts image files (*.img) as new browseable computer resources. View, edit, rename, delete, create, or launch files on a virtual floppy as well as format.

Visual Subst allows you to associate the most accessed directories with virtual drives. It uses the same API like the console subst utility, but makes it easier to create and remove virtual drives with a friendly user interface. Visual Subst can also restore the virtual drives at startup.

NOTE: Program became shareware, linking to Softpedia for the last freeware version.

Hard Disk Indicator displays hard disk activity via an LED indicator in the system tray. It is able to monitor up to 5 hard disk drives.