Modern hard drives are generally very reliable, and may survive the entire lifetime of your PC without any problems at all. There are no guarantees, though, so it’s wise to have one or two diagnostic programs to hand, and DHE Drive Info makes a feature-packed first choice.

The program is portable, just unzip and run, and a list of drives and partitions covers all the basics: drive model, type, temperature, health score, capacity, free space, read/ write indicators and more.

The “Information” pane provides more low-level details than you’d get from many specialist system information tools, including manufacturer, product ID, features supported, SMART summary and information on the drive controller.

If these first reports suggest health problems then you’re able to view the drive’s SMART indicators, error counts which might point to hardware issues. The CONTROL screen has options to run various drive self-tests which might tell you more.

Get in-depth system information on your hardware, SMART indicators and partitions

DHE Drive Info isn’t just about your hardware. There’s also plenty of useful partition information to explore – type, file system, mountpoint, size, boot record details – and you can browse the MBR, VBR, MFT or the entire hard drive at the sector level.

Still can’t figure out the issue? Clicking Tools > Search Disk Online opens a browser window with the results of a web search for your drive model.

There are also bonus tools to raise alerts if you drive temperature increases, to regularly save SMART details for review later, to back up your MBR or enable/ disable various drive features (SMART, APM, AAM, more).

It’s not all good news. The interface is awkward, and DHE Drive Info doesn’t even try to work with anything else. It would be useful to have some double or right-click actions to open Explorer, Disk Management, maybe the Performance Monitor, for example, but no – there’s nothing like that here.

Still, DHE Drive Info does provide a wealth of features and functionality – even on Windows 10, thanks to the latest update – and on balance it’s well worth a place in your troubleshooting toolkit. Give it a try.