Disk / Storage (33)

The 33 utilities in Disk / Storage exist because "how much space do I have" is only the first and easiest question you can ask about a drive. Underneath that single number sits interface type, firmware revision, sector size, partition alignment, SMART health data, spindle speed (or its absence, on solid-state media), and a long tail of formatting and imaging operations that most people only need once or twice a year but absolutely need to get right when the moment comes.

Identification tools form the backbone of the category. Drive Model Viewer, Drive Firmware Viewer, Drive Serial Number Viewer and Drive Serial Viewer each read one specific field that Windows exposes through Win32_DiskDrive, useful for warranty lookups, asset tags, and confirming that the drive Device Manager shows really is the one physically installed. Drive Capacity Checker and Drive Sector Size Checker report the numbers manufacturers rarely advertise clearly — raw byte capacity versus the "GB" on the box, and the 512-byte versus 4K sector size that occasionally trips up older imaging software. Drive Interface Checker and Drive Interface Viewer identify whether a disk is talking over SATA, NVMe or USB, while SSD-Z distills all of this into a single compact panel purpose-built for solid-state drives, right down to partition alignment.

Health and monitoring make up the category's most technically interesting corner. Drive SMART Viewer decodes the raw 512-byte S.M.A.R.T. attribute table byte-by-byte into a readable ID/current/worst/raw grid — the same data CrystalDiskInfo built its reputation on. SSD Wear Level Checker and SSD Health Percentage Viewer read the modern Storage Management API's reliability counters to report wear-out percentage directly from the drive's own controller, and Drive Temperature Monitor and Drive Temperature Viewer do the same for thermal data. Drive Free Space Monitor, Drive Activity Monitor and Drive Rotation Speed Viewer round out live monitoring, the last one doubling as a quick way to confirm whether a drive is a spinning HDD or an SSD by reading its reported spindle speed.

Structural and management tools cover the operations you reach for less often but need to trust completely when you do. Partition Information Tool and Disk Mount Information list every partition and drive letter with its type and readiness state; Drive Letter Manager reassigns letters through diskpart with an extra warning before it lets you touch a system drive; CheckDisk GUI wraps the built-in CHKDSK utility in a friendlier point-and-click front end. Formatting gets two dedicated, narrowly-scoped tools — FAT32 Format (GUIformat) and SD Card Formatter — both of which insist on strong confirmation before erasing anything and deliberately restrict themselves to removable media to reduce the chance of an expensive mistake.

Two tools handle the more advanced end of the category. Win32 Disk Imager reads or writes a raw disk image sector-by-sector to a USB drive, the same technique used to flash bootable Linux or recovery images, again scoped to removable disks only for safety. Contig (Sysinternals GUI) checks a file's fragment count via the same FSCTL used by the original Sysinternals tool and can rewrite a file contiguous on the same volume. Drive-Sort takes a completely different, much safer approach to an old problem — instead of touching a FAT directory table's raw sector layout, it simply rewrites a folder's files back in alphabetical order, which is enough to fix the maddening playback-order bug on FAT-formatted car stereos and cheap MP3 players without any risk of directory-table corruption.