DHE Drive Info, Portable Hard Drive Information Software

DHE Drive Info is a free portable software for the Windows operating system that displays extensive information about all connected hard drives and their partitions. It may take the program a few seconds to scan all drives before information about them are displayed in list form in the main application window. Each device is listed with its name, connection type, size, serial and drive status information.

All drive partitions are listed underneath each drive with their assigned drive letters, file system, size and status.

Below the drive listing is an area with six tabs that display information about the selected hard drive or partition.

The Information tab lists everything there is to know about the selected drive. From the firmware version over transfer mode and version, to the drive’s rotation rate, temperature, transfer features and controller information.

The S.M.A.R.T. tab lists all Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology information that the drive provides. This can be helpful for troubleshooting purposes, as you get realtime data that may reveal upcoming drive issues. Error logs, including self-test logs, write and read stream error logs or extended self-test logs are displayed in the logs tab next to it.

The Control tab lists supported drive features and whether they are enabled or not. This includes features such as S.M.A.R.T. but also Advanced Power Management, Advanced Acoustic Management or Auto Offline Data Collection. State changes are not saved even though it is possible to click on on or off to switch a feature on or off.

DHE Drive Info offers additional tools that are mostly relevant to technicians. This includes a built-in sector browser, a list of all supported features and commands, and an option to create reports via the File > Save Reports menu.

Regular users can configure the program to display a notification if a drive’s temperature reaches a selected threshold.

DH Drive Info is a useful hard drive diagnostic software for the Windows operating system. The portable nature of the application makes it a good fit for a troubleshooting DVD or USB stick.

TDP x-Ray Lite Hard Drive Manager

There are many ways that Windows users can manage hard disk space. You can manage your hard drives with the Windows Disk Management utility, but it is somewhat difficult to navigate. Programs like WinDirStat are great for getting a good visual scheme. Tools with visual graphing for hard disk management are ideal. Everybody has their own style and preferences. TDP x-Ray Lite is a free hard disk management tool that uses a multi-layered pie chart scheme to represent usage of hard disk space.

Displayed in the middle of the window is a colorful chart showing memory information in different sizes and colors around the chart. Unused disk space is shown with no extensions, as that part of the drive is blank. On the left panel shows all connected drives. It will show USB drives, external hard drives, SD cards, partitions, etc. When you click on a particular field, you see what that area of the hard drive contains and another pie chart will be presented to represent that space and the different files and folders contained therein. This is quite handy when you need to clean your hard drive space or find specific files and folders.

In the screenshot above, you can see all of the sectors in Drive C: and by placing the mouse over a certain area, a small box provides the information for the occupancy of that sector. In this example, VirtualBox is highlighted. Click on the selected field and you will get the specifics.

When you get the pie chart for the selected sector, X – Ray Lite allows you to go deeper. For example, the VirtualBox chart has 4 sectors representing virtual machines stored on the hard drive. In this demonstration, the area for Debian Linux is found when the mouse is hovered over an area. When this is clicked, a chart that isolates Debian is displayed.

You follow the same process to isolate any file or folder from the original chart for any given drive highlighted in the left pane. By right-clicking a sector of the chart, you are presented with a context menu with options to Zoom, Recycle or Delete and also view Properties. From there, you can do what you want. To clear any area of the hard drive, select delete and then empty the recycle bin. Alternatively, you can choose the Zoom option to get even more detailed specifics of the drive memory occupation or open the Properties.

There is also an option to access the application from the Windows Explorer context menu. From Windows Explorer, select a folder and right-click to open the context menu. Right-click the selected folder and select “x-Ray it!” and this will show a pie chart for that file.

TDP x-Ray Lite is incredibly easy to use and versatile. For users who work well with pie chart schemes, it is ideal. When you download the application, a desktop icon is generally not created. You will have to open the start menu and use the search box to find it then drag and drop to the desktop if you want an icon there.

Download TDP x-Ray Lite from this link:
http://www.tdp.cz/downloads/en/xray-lite

TDP x-Ray Lite works on all versions of Windows.

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© Melanie Gross for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: hard disk space, hard drive manager, hard-drive, storage space, windows software