Bvckup 2 developer Pipemetrics has released the first beta of Diskovery, a free system information tool which reveals all about your PC’s storage devices.

It’s a familiar idea, but Diskovery stands out for its thoroughness, using multiple technologies to discover and talk to drives.

Direct ATA queries, ATA pass-through queries, SCSI pass-through queries, Common Storage Management Interface, the Virtual Disk Service and Windows API are all involved, allowing the program to uncover much more data than some similar tools.

You can expect details on local drives, external USB disks, RAID setups (hardware and software) and more, even RAM disks and – maybe – encrypted volumes.

The report includes device product ID, manufacturer, volume/ PNP ID, volume type, partition types, capacity, used space, file system, SMART data, supported features, USB type of a drive enclosure, RAID type/ status/ composition, and more.

There’s a lot of low-level technical detail here – but no way to save it as a report

What you don’t seem to get, unfortunately, is any way to save this information as a report, a problem if you were hoping to analyse it later.

Diskovery is still a beta, of course, so this might arrive in a future release. And if you’re interested, we’d say take a look anyway: it’s only a 226KB download, a single executable, no installation or other hassles involved.

Diskovery is a freeware tool for Windows Vista and later.