Whenever you plug in a removable device such as a flash drive or USB hard drive, Windows automatically assigns a drive letter. While this is usually fine, there are certain circumstances where this can cause problems such as when you have a large number of mapped drives. If you want to gain control over this process, a tool which helps is USB Drive Letter Manager.

USBDLM is a Windows service that gives control over Window’s drive letter assignment for USB drives. Running as service makes it independent of the logged on user’s privileges, so there is no need to give the users the privilege to change drive letters.
It automatically solves conflicts between USB drives and network or subst drives of the currently logged on user.
Furthermore you can define new default letters for USB drives and much more.

Basically, you create a configuration file that tells Windows what drive letters to use when a new device is plugged in. With the service running in the background when a device is plugged in, the drives are assigned in the order you specified.

USBDLM also allows control over card readers:

The typical 20-in-1 card reader eats one drive letter for each of its slots – if we have a card for or not. USBDLM can remove the reader’s drive letter until a media is inserted.

Overall, this free tool manages just about everything when it comes to removable devices and drive letters.

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