Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite 2010 review

Hard Disk Manager 2010 hands you full control over your hard disk. The old launch interface has been given a lick of digital paint, making it easier to find the tools you need from the off.

These are grouped into themes covering partitioning, backup and recovery, copy and migration, security and optimisation, plus a new boot management section. Individual tasks can be launched from here, but you can always skip into the full blown application at any time to access the full gamut of options.

The main application is easy to find your way around. Tasks are intelligently grouped in the left-hand bar, while the main pane displays detailed but easy to digest information about your hard disks and partitions. You can either activate tasks by clicking in the left-hand pane, or directly interact with partitions by right clicking on them, which renders complex system changes easy to understand and execute.

Partitions can be created, copied, resized, merged and deleted with ease. You can also redistribute free space to partitions and securely wipe partitions from your hard disk before disposal. It’s possible to back up entire disks or partitions or limit the backup to select files or folders, which can then be stored either locally on a hard disk, secure partition or optical drive.

These backups can be supplemented by further incremental and differential backups over time. Incremental backups save the changes since the last backup, while differential backups save the changes since the first backup. The professional edition allows you to reinstate incremental or differential changes to your hard disk without re-running a full system backup.

Hard Disk Manager Suite 2010 now comes with an improved boot manager. As a nod to those that like to use more than one OS, the boot manager sits between your power button and operating systems, allowing you to choose which to launch when you power up your computer. This works fine for different versions of Windows – XP and Vista for example – but, as with the previous version of Hard Disk Manager, it doesn’t recognise alternative boot loaders like GRUB, the popular Linux boot loader.

Hard Disk Manager 2010 simplifies the process of upgrading your computer while maintaining your existing system setup. Using the Windows PE boot environment, you can modify your existing operating system to suit new hardware, meaning you can simply connect your old hard disk to a new computer and boot into Windows.

Many important tasks, particularly those that involve partition or system recovery, can only be undertaken in the Windows PE boot environment. This allows you to execute the full range of Hard Disk Manager's tools outside of your existing Windows installation. As the name suggests, the Boot environment mimics Windows, so it's just as easy to use – and reassuring in emergencies.

Despite the £40 price difference, most home users will not gain much from the Professional 2010 version. It supports dynamic disks and volumes, something that the home or small business user is unlikely to require, and has a wider range of virtualisation functions, including the ability to copy and restore volumes as virtual machines, and perform maintenance on inactive virtual machines. Hard Disk Manager Suite 2010 itself is a first rate yet inexpensive disk management utility.