Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2010 review

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2010 isn’t just a boastful name – it really is a one-stop shop the hard disk management. There’s disk imaging, partition management, boot creation and repair, and secure deletion and backup on-demand. But is it jack-of-all-trades, master of none?

Actually, it’s rather good – at everything. Rather than list everything it can do (check out the website for that information), we’ve decided to list what we really enjoyed.

Disk Cloning: Paragon has all you’ll ever need for disk cloning. You can choose to encrypt it, split the end file into multiple ones and choose which files to include/exclude. It even lets you backup disks that you’re currently working on, making the lives of novice users to professionals much easier.

Partition: Partition options are extreme – you can manage up to 16 different operating systems on a single hard drive. These partitions can then be resized at any time. Along with partition creation and formatting, you can also hide or unhide each one (for the top-secret files that you probably don’t have). This can all be done via wizards, which are actually pretty helpful for even the least experience hard disk managers.

If you get tired of the partition, you can back it up to disk, freeing up your hard drive for other things.

Boot manager: Those 16 possible operating systems can be accessed by the improved boot manager. This is great at launching different versions of Windows, but we’ve heard there is some difficulty in getting into recognisable talented boot loaders, such as GRUB for Linux.

Secure Erase: If you need to dispose of those top-secret files we mentioned earlier, secure erase is the way to do it. You can choose just how in-depth you want your secure erase to be, but like everything else in the package, there are some pretty good default options.

Adjust OS: Plug in a hard disk and from another Windows computer and this utility will update the drivers so the drive can be booted on the host PC. Great for migrating an old PC into the new one.

Professional: The professional edition comes with a variety of virtualisation options. Most useful is the ability to copy and restore volumes as virtual machines, allowing you to access and edit back-ups without restoring them.

The only downside to the product is that, despite efforts to make it accessible, the array of options can be somewhat overwhelming. Still, being killed by choice isn’t too bad a way to go.