System - Storage (44)

vSubst helps assign virtual drive letters to any folder on your hard disk. It is a graphical interface for the SUBST command. The limitations are:

• SUBSTed-drives don't operate 100% in networks
• Some copy-protected CD-ROMs check for the physical presence of a disk
• Volume-Label is always identical to the host label

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.

Drive Manager enables drive identification/information, hiding drive letters, and substituting drive letters for folders. For drive identification, it displays vendor information so that multiple CD/DVD drives and removable drives (such as USB memory drives) can be differentiated by their vendor and product ID.

HDD Health monitors hard disks from the system tray using various S.M.A.R.T sensors (Self Monitoring and Reporting Technology), alerting you of impending failure via email, pop-up messages, net messages or event logging.

DPC Latency Checker analyzes the capabilities of a computer system to handle real-time data streams properly. It may help to find the cause for interruptions in real-time audio and video streams, also known as drop-outs.

DiskView shows you a graphical map of your disk. It allows you to determine where a file is located or, by clicking on a cluster, see which file occupies it. You can double-click to get more information about a file to which a cluster is allocated.

NoDrives Manager is a free, simple tool for hiding Windows logical
drives by modifying the registry. The hidden drives are still accessible but they are not visible in the Windows Explorer.

Leelu Virtual Drives Manager let you in a quick way, create a Symbolic link (aka MS-DOS Device name) to a folder and present it as drive. Drives that are created with will stay even after you restart your system and you can easily remove them by restarting Virtual Drives Manager.

This is useful for some applications that insist on being installed to a specific/root drive, to more easily and logically divide your directory structure for different users, or to create a quick access to a long path directly from My Computer.

Note: We are linking to the 1.0 version of this software but other versions of this software are considered adware.

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.

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.

DiskImage helps backup/restore partitions, entire hard disks, USB storage devices, floppy drives and CDs/DVDs to/from files. It supports ZIP compression (and custom compression method for data greater than 2GB), MD5 and SHA1 checksumming, built-in hex editor for sector editing, and various other tools like drive speed and seek test.

HD Tune is a hard disk utility that includes drive info, benchmarking, and drive health. Information includes partitions, firmware version, serial number, etc. while benchmarking covers transfer rate, access time, burst rate, and more. Health parameters include the S.M.A.R.T details as well as temperature and a whole disk surface scan.

Functional with SSD and flash memory.

Note: this is the last freeware version. A "pro" version with additional features is available from the website.

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.

Sector Editor is a little program which shows, edits, prints and searches disks sectors. The information is edited in ASCII or hexadecimal. Sectors can be copied and imported/exported from/to files.

Portable Storage Explorer displays USB devices, removable storage, CD-ROM and DVD drive information and state, drive type, serial number, revision, device name, last cleaned time, device vendor and product name, operational state, created and modified time, device library etc. on any remote network computer, provided you have administrative privileges on the that machine.

USB Memory Stick Tester helps to test removable storage media (such as USB memory sticks) for defects. The current version is only able to test the unused space from the disk. As a result, the program requires formatting the drive before a full test can be performed.

DTemp is a small program that sits in the system tray and monitors the temperature of your harddisks. It is also able to warn you about runaway harddisk temperature or impending harddisk failure based on its S.M.A.R.T parameters.

Virtual Drives Manager is a tool for defining virtual drives in your filesystem. Virtual drives are symbolic links that points to existing directories on your filesystem. This is essentially a graphical version of subst.exe.

Note: This application periodically tries to contact www.appcontrols.com. If you are using a personal firewall, you can simply block it from accessing the network. But if you are really fussy about such things, then you might not want to use the program at all.