System - Storage (44)

TestDisk is a powerful drive and data recovery software that is designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again. This can be caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses, or of course human error (such as accidentally deleting your partition table).

The program is cross-platform with recovery tools for a long list file systems and includes the also-portable recovery software PhotoRec.

Note: Use with caution; it's recommended that you read the documentation and take your time. The software can easily made dramatic and difficult-to-reverse system modifications.

CrystalDiskMark is benchmarks disk performance, measuring sequential and random 4KB/512KB reads/writes for any storage device. The target device does not need to be formatted.

A 64-bit version is available (within the folder).

Alternatively, CrystalDiskMark Portable is also available, which auto-switches between x86 and x64.

CrystalDiskInfo monitors disk health status and temperature, monitoring/graphing of S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic information. The program also tells you how many times the hard disk has been turned on and how many hours.

Functional with magnetic and solid state disks.

DiskGenius is full-featured partition manager, which is designed to optimize disk usage for Windows users. It allows you to resize, extend, split, create, delete, format, hide, copy and erase partition to maximize disk space use.

DiskGenius is a complete disk & partition solution for Windows PCs that helps managing storage space for higher efficiency.

There is also a Lite version available that only features the partition manager. Find the links in the comments or in the associated forum thread.

CheckDisk searches for and repairs disk errors via either a basic or thorough surface test. The program is similar to ScanDisk and chkdsk tools supplied with Windows. It can find bad sectors on your disk and mark them as such, working on both hard disks (including SCSI and RAID) and removable media. It can also check CDs for errors as well.

Note: Manual is in German.

DriveGLEAM indicates read/write activity for your hard drives in the system tray and also includes built in extensions for monitoring CPU and memory load. It also supports sending this information to the parallel port, so you can plug in your own electronics for visual display.

Support Windows 64-Bit versions.

HardDriveIndicator sits in the system tray and shows the input/output load of your local physical disks by displaying a five-bar indicator for both read and write operations. It supports auto-calibration to ensure that the output values are relative to the disk usage for that session.

Site no longer lists affiliation with this program, linking to Softpedia (thanks emka).

imageUSB writes exact bit-level image files to multiple flash drives. The program preserves all unused and slack space during the cloning process, including the Master Boot Record (MBR) and can perform flawless mass duplications of all UFD images, including bootable UFDs.

The program can also "zero" a USB drive, which is an efficient wipes to erase data with less harm to overall drive life. In addition, imageUSB has the ability to reformat even hard to format drives and reclaim any disk space that may be lost previously.

DriveLetterView allows you to view the list of all drive letter assignments in your system, including local drives, remote network drives, CD/DVD drives, and USB drives - even if they are not currently plugged in. It also allows you to easily change a drive letter of USB devices and remote network shares, as well as to delete a drive letter of USB device that is not plugged in.

Explore2fs is an explorer-type application for browsing Linux file systems under Windows. The program is compatible with most filesystems including ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, and more. Explore2fs Portable Edition is a wrapper for the program.

Note: This is a PortableApps.com portable program that has not been updated since 2006 and may not work with the latest changes to various file systems (e.g., the "About" dialog only mentions Linux 'ext2' and 'ext3' file systems and not 'ext4').

BOOTICE is a boot-related maintenance gadget that is used to install, repair, backup and restore disk (mirrored) MBR or partition PBR; edit Windows boot configuration file BCD; manage UEFI startup items; VHD / VHDX file management. In addition, it has disk sector editing, disk filling, partition management, disk partitioning and formatting, GRUB4DOS menu editing and other functions.

NOTE: Homepage is down, linking to Softpedia.

DriveSort directly reads directory tables of FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 formatted volumes, allowing users to view file listings in the order they were written.

Recent operating systems re-sort file lists before display, either by name, by size, or by whatever the user chooses. However, the firmware of playing devices -- like small MP3 players, for example -- sometimes behaves differently, mostly because they lack necessary resources (CPU, memory), a problem developers usually solve by dis/playing files in the order they are written on the storage medium -- normally, the order they were added.

Additionally, DriveSort is able to change that ordering, making itself useful for re-arranging movies, series episodes, audio or picture files on FATx formatted media; afterwards, players will be able to reproduce files in the expected sequence.

HDDScan is a feature-rich disk diagnostics tool with a variety of low-level tools. It supports IDE/SATA/SCSI hard disk drives, RAID arrays, SSD drives, external USB/Firewire hard disks, flash cards and can scan the surface, view SMART attributes, adjust AAM, APM (Power Management), monitor temperature etc.

Note the program shouldn’t be run from a read-only device/media.

HDHacker is a utility that saves, visualizes and restores the MBR (from a physical drive), the boot sector (from a logical drive) or any sector on a disk. It can be used to save and restore a particular boot manager (e.g. LILO). It can also be used to backup the MBR or boot sector so that they can be restored later if corrupted.

PassMark DiskCheckup is a disk diagnostic tool that monitors the disk drive for possible long term drive failure indicators via SMART sensors. This includes 'Spin Up Time', number of start/stops, number of hours powered on, and temperature all displayed with the threshold value for that attribute. Users can evaluate drive reliability by observing if the value is close to or below the threshold.

It is recommended that system drives at threshold be replaced or shifted to backup / redundant data storage.

DriveImage XML allows you to backup any logical drive or partition to an image file, even if the drive or partition is currently in use. You can browse an image file, view/extract files from it, or restore the image to the same or different drive. It also has a function to help you clone one hard disk to another.

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).

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.

DiskSmartView is a small utility that retrieves useful insights on the health of your drives. The program uses standard diagnostic data from the "S.M.A.R.T," or Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology data drawn from IDE/SATA disks. This includes the model/firmware/serial number, cylinders/heads, power-on hours (POH), internal temperature, disk errors rate, and more.

This data can help you determine if there are any significant problems with your drive and whether it may be nearing end-of-life.

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.

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.

Disk Investigator displays the true drive contents by bypassing the operating system and directly reading the raw drive sectors. You can view and search raw directories, files, clusters, and system sectors, verify the effectiveness of file and disk wiping programs, and undelete previously deleted files.

Functional on 64-bit systems.

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.

AutoStart creates an icon in the system tray for each external memory device connected to the system. Right-clicking on this icon opens a context menu that allows you to conveniently perform various related functions (explore, search, eject, properties).

Left-clicking opens the drive in Explorer by default but the default application can be specified in the "shell" parameter of AUTORUN.INF. AutoStart also comes with a rudimentary launcher that is functional if you have a small number of applications stored on your memory stick.

Note: Main download site is offline, download link pointing to Softpedia.

Stream Explorer is a utility that reveals file streams within NTFS filesystems. It will show you the number, type, size and content of streams for each file or folder selected.

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.