As can be seen from the title, the following guide will help you find out what storage device has been connected to your computer as well as the date and time when it was connected. Thus knowing the last date of connection of a certain USB device you will be able to detect an eventual data theft or unwanted software installation attempt. This could be an easy way to improve security in your home or office especially if you own a computer system containing valuable information that should not be publicly available. Of course this is not the only application of this manual as it can be used for many other useful tasks such as detection of problems with drivers or malfunctioning USB devices (not only for data storage but also a webcams, printers, scanners, etc.).

Generally there are two ways to find the information you need.The first is to do this manually using the Windows registry editor (here is the place to mention that information for all external devices connected to the computer is stored in the system registry of Windows) and the second is by using programs specifically intended for this purpose. To open the registry editor go to start menu then type regedit in the search field and press enter. Now go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USBSTOR. Under the USBSTOR key you can find a list of subkeys each of which corresponding to a specific usb device.

If the information in the registry seems confusing and incomprehensible, you can use the following program. USBDeview is an application that will read information from the registry for you and present it in a form convenient for viewing.

Once opened it will show you some of the more important characteristics of a selected device such as device name , serial number, last plug/unplug date, firmware revision and even power consumption.