Compton is a portable tool for Windows that can be used to find out all the storage devices attached to your PC. It can display the devices listed under three different categories – devices discovered based on their device letters, devices discovered using the popular SetupDi functions (Win32 SetupAPI interface) and the devices discovered using their physical drive connections. All three methods may discover the same devices or different devices based on your computer configuration.
The first method (SetupDi) lists all kinds of devices including the hard disks, solid state disks, optical media, USB disks and also includes all of the partitions (recognized by Windows) in the list. The second method (drive letters) is same as having a look in Windows File Explorer. The third method (physical drive) shows all the storage disk drives connected to your PC (both fixed storage disks as well as removable USB disks).
You can right-click on any of these disks and choose to Show the SMART values for that disk. The values like raw read error count, temperature, spin up time, start/stop count etc., are displayed along with their minimum, maximum and threshold values. The SMART values are displayed only if the storage disk has this feature (only HDD and SSD have this feature) and also if SMART is enabled in the motherboard’s UEFI or BIOS.
The program also allows you to securely erase any disk. For this you can right-click on any of the listed disks and then choose Perform Secure Erase from the menu. This will completely destroy all the data on the selected partition or disk in a manner that it cannot be recovered even by the professional data recovery experts. Please be careful not to accidentally erase one of the disk drives that contains some important documents or other critical files.
Verdict: Compton is small, fast and portable tool to detect and securely erase all the storage disks attached to your Windows PC. Even if a storage disk or partition is not visible in File Explorer, Compton can detect it using some special methods.
You can download Compton from http://www.the-sz.com/products/compton/.