When we looked at Paragon's Hard Disk Manager 2009 Suite which costs around £30, we commented on its partitioning abilities and pointed out a couple of shortfalls. Partition Manager 10 Personal is primarily the partitioning segment of that program, with some of the back-up and restore components, for around five pounds less. So, why would you need a partitioning application?

A hard drive partition is a construct which enables you to deal with several ‘logical' drives on a single, physical hard drive. You could, for example, have drive C (one partition) on one hard drive and drives D and E (two further partitions) on another. Partition Manager helps you change the relative sizes of the partitions on a drive, defragment them, delete them, create new ones, move them, format them and assign drive letters.

It can either do this through a series of Wizards, designed for those with less experience, which are generally easy to use, or go for the full-blooded interface, which is still straightforward but better for those with a bit more experience. Having set up the changes you want to make to the partitions on a drive, Partition Manager 10 usually restarts the computer and enacts them without starting Windows, to give it more direct access to each drive.

The software can work with partitions containing NTFS, FAT32, FAT16, several varieties of Linux including ReiserFS and Apple HFS. One of the product's options is to redistribute space between OS X and Windows partitions on a dual-boot Mac. The program can set up a multi-boot system itself, using just about any combination of supported operating systems, so you can quickly switch OSes at start-up.

As well as installing multiple operating systems, Partition Manager 10 can back-up a complete partition or drive to an internal or external drive and restore it from there. It took 11.5 minutes to back-up an 8.9GB partition on our test machine, but the software did it all under Windows, rather than restarting and running its own Linux OS. Oddly, it still restarts for comparatively simple tasks, like defragmenting a drive, even though Windows can do that itself as a background task.

There's no option to split an existing partition on the main menu, but the same effect can be achieved through the Create Partition option. However, the visual representation of this process is confusing and it would be more helpful if the procedure were carried out as a separate function, since most people think of the two operations as functionally different.

Verdict
Partition Manager is one of those programs you won't use every day, but is essential when you want to reorganise your storage. It does what it claims without fuss, though it would be good if it had a separate menu option for splitting a partition directly. It's handy to have drive back-up and restore functions included in the same suite.

Company: Paragon Software

Contact: 00 49 761 59018 202

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