Drive Manager is a powerful tool which can display a great deal more information about all your PCs drives.

This starts just by clearly identifying what sort of device an individual drive might be: a regular local hard drive, a CD or DVD drive, a removable disk, a network drive and more (which isn't always clear in Explorer).

And then you'll see all the usual core details displayed up-front: volume label, drive capacity, used and free space, the drive model or product ID, file system, whether it's visible or not, and so on.

Need more low-level information? Then just click a drive, then select the Disk Info button. You'll see details like its device name (\Device\HarddiskVolume1), its bytes per sector, sectors per cluster, and a host of strictly-for-geeks file system flags. (If you know enough about file systems to care whether a drive supports object IDs, reparse points or sparse files, say, this is the place to look.)

And Drive Manager can also map or disconnect network drives, create and remove SUBST drives (a virtual drive which points to a file path), hide drives from Explorer, check your drives for errors, safely disconnect USB drives, run drive benchmarks and a whole lot more.

There are some problems here, too. When we scanned a test system with a DVD in one drive, for instance, the program took so long to start that we thought it had hung up entirely. And while we were eventually able to gain control, one or two modules (like the SMART reporter) didn't seem to work.

This may have been some odd issue relating to our setup, though, and even there, once the DVD was removed then everything worked just fine. So if you're looking for a compact portable suite of drive-related tools, then give Drive Manager a look - it's packed with useful functionality.