Include Detailed Drive Name/Information As New Column Option

Help & Support
1

:innocent:
Since there is no way to use "description" as a column header directly as it pertains to detailed drive information, is there a way of baking that information from reading what Device Manager, or some other app can see, if not without a bit of difficulty?

Having a mix of 8 total drives in a desktop, with a few of the same capacity but of different types gets a little hard to manage at times.

eg:

  • Samsung 850 EVO 250GB
  • WD Blue SN570 250GB

These two are indistinguishable, and the volume names aren't long enough to allow for anything longer than 11 characters...

2

With about 20 drives connected (internal & external), what I did :

  1. Naming consistent with drive content (some named Data 2023, Data 2021, ...)
  2. Made dedicated icons (autorun.inf at drive root)
  3. Made specific colors (folder format pointing at c:, d:, ... or /$driveName)

EDIT: and of course, lots of folder aliases to jump directly to most used folders without having to remember what drive it's on.

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3

TYVM :innocent:

All of those are really good advice. But I was thinking more how to add to the uppermost lister display, where the drives cannot have a description column.

If there's no means for digging into the drive's properties to dig its hardware name out, then using the full 32-character NTFS limit seems to be the only alternative.

4

Icons and colors (front & back) are clearly visible in the uppermost lister display, if by that you mean "This PC" view with tiles.
Can't share my setup since away from home (and no opus available on Android yet :slight_smile: ... @Leo : any plans for this :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile: )

5

What do you mean by "uppermost lister display"?

6

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7

You can get the drives' serial numbers from the FileSystemObject quite easily. More info like DeviceID and the FriendlyName like in your example is available through PowerShell (with a bit more coding effort).

8

I understand this info will come in handy for some folks, so maybe in the future it can be integrated into DO.
However, **since this is DO**, here's a small test script, @ZenZenPup if you're willing to test it. No Powershell needed. It works in 'This PC' too.
In a small test, it seems to do the job.

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It currently adds:

  • Drive SN
  • Drive Name
  • Drive ID
  • Drive Model
  • Drive Status
  • Drive Partitions
  • Total Cylinders
  • Total Heads
  • Total Sectors
  • Total Tracks
  • Tracks per Cylinder
  • Drive Size
    Drives Extended Info.opusscriptinstall (2.3 KB)

Edit: It seems that can be expanded for network drives as well...

2 Likes
9

Thanks @errante
FYI, minor remark : initData.min_version = "13.9"; should actually be initData.min_version = "13.9.6"; since the script uses initData.config_group_order.
I've not updated yet, and this leads to failure to init on this line in OnInit function.

10

True!
That happened by copying it from another script, since that part is unnecessary.
Fwiw, An improved version is available here

1 Like