Software
Most solid state drive manufacturers have some sort of software that goes along with their drives. It helps you to keep an eye on things, check up on your drives health, and perform maintenance tasks. Crucial’s software package is called Storage Executive and it is available to download from the Crucial’s own website.
Crucial Storage Executive
The Crucial Storage Executive isn’t as much a program and more of a service. It will run in the background with a tray-icon to activate or close it. When running, it will launch a service that you can visit using any browser. The first page you are presented with is the System information. It will show your basic information, used and free memory, and all your storage drives.
On the second page you can view more details about your drive, its serial number, capacity, available space, total bytes written, driver, and firmware version. It will also show the drives health status and temperature. Both this and the previous page will tell you when a firmware update is available. That part failed in my test, but that can be due to numerous reasons, including BIOS and Windows settings.
The third page is the SMART page where you can get detailed information about your drives thanks to the self reporting mechanisms built into them.
The fourth page was for the Firmware update, but as I previously mentioned, I couldn’t get that to work. The fifth page will allow you to sanitize your drive. This function will remove any data from your drive, including partitions. It will take a while to complete, but no more than a couple of minutes.
The last two functions aren’t available in this case, as the screenshots also explain by themselves.
Crucial’s Storage Executive is a nice tool, it’s easy to use and it has the features you’ll want from such a tool.
