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Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite 2008
Price:
Supplier: Paragon Software Group
Sales:
sales@paragon-software.com
Windows Vista’s disk management tools are adequate to say the least.
Microsoft certainly wouldn’t be given top marks for effort in this
section of the Vista operating system. Okay compared with earlier
versions of windows, Vista now has the option of extending and/or
shrinking a partition and better facilities for backing up files,
although you do need the Business or Ultimate versions of Vista to
completely image your hard drive; however both these options are nowhere
near what can be achieved with third party hard drive management tools
such as Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite 2008.
Five Utilities
Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite is a complete set of maintenance tools
consisting of five essential utilities; they are as follows:
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Protect Your System and Data
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Maintenance
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Rescue and Recovery
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Securely dispose of hard drive
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Advanced options
Options Galore
Click on any one of the main menu categories and an alternative set of
options appear to complete the job. These accompanying set of options
takes the form of links to other built in utilities. For instance, click
on Protect Your System and Data and you will be offered links to enable
the backup and/or restoration of your system. While links adequately do
the intended job, they do, sadly, tend to cheapen the look of the
application. While links are extremely useful for websites I feel
buttons would have been more appropriate for this main menu and,
certainly far more appealing.
Fig:1 Hard Disk Manager's Main Menu
When backing up the contents of your hard drive you have the option of
either backing up to a secure partition – better known as a backup
capsule – created by HDM or copy and burning the files or image to a set
of CDs or DVDs.
Maintaining Your System
Maintenance is the key to a stable system and one essential maintenance
job that should never be underestimated is defragmenting the drive.
Defragmenting the hard drive is extremely important. A correctly
defragmented hard drive helps increase the PCs performance by ensuring
that all relevant parts of a file are stored together, rather than being
scattered over the surface of the drive. The defragmenting utility in
HDM is not unlike other third party defragmentation tools with the
exception that when defragmenting the system drive the application is
forced to use the pre-windows environment. This I found to be rather an
inconvenience considering that Microsoft’s own defragmenter, along with
many third party defragmenters such as PerfectDisk, Diskeeper, etc can
defragment a system drive without the need to boot to a pre-windows
environment. Surprisingly i also found that HDM’s defragmenter took
considerably longer to defragment than other well known brands.
Defragmenting a 100GB system drive, for example, took well over an hour
with HMD, while PerfectDisk took merely 27 minutes.
Fig: 2 Defragmenting the hard drive
As well as defragmenting the drive the maintenance option also allows
the user to copy the system drive along with all its data and then
migrate it to a new drive. This is an essential utility if, for example,
you decide to upgrade to a larger hard drive. Rather than re-installing
Windows and all your applications from scratch on a new drive you can
simply migrate the data using this utility. The old drive can thus
either be disposed of or, if it is in good working order, pressed into
service as a second or backup drive.
To The Rescue
While it is an easy matter to backup or restore an image to a hard drive, it is not usually all that easy to pick out single files or folders for restoration. With the Rescue and Recovery option of HDM you have just that option. By clicking on the Transfer File option you can back up individual files by selecting them from the available list.
Fig: 3 Transfer files from the right hand pane to the clipboard pane on the left.
From here on it is just a matter of saving the files to another drive or
CD or DVD. Restoring files is just as easy. Just open the Rescue and
Recovery, select the location of the backup files, select the file(s)
you want and then restore them to their original locations.
Disappearing Act
At some point your PC is either going to become outdated or else pieces
of the hardware are going to start to fail. Inevitably, the point will
arrive where you will want a brand new all singing all dancing model,
with all the latest bells and whistles. However, once you have splashed
out on your new computer you are faced with another dilemma, what to do
with the old one?
Well you have two choices: you can dump the machine at the local
recycling centre, or you can give it away to a deserving cause or
relative. Both options are admirable; however, aren’t you forgetting
something? What are you going to do about all the sensitive data already
stored on the hard drive? How are you going to remove it so no one else
can access it?
Your first and most obvious thought is to re-format the drive. Well, of
course, that is one solution – probably not the best, but a solution at
any rate. The problem with just formatting a drive is that anyone with
knowhow and the correct software can easily resurrect every piece of
data that previously existed on the hard drive.
The Securely Dispose of Hard Drive option has its own solution – Disk
Wiper. This enables the user to completely obliterate any sensitive data
stored on the hard drive, firstly by formatting the drive and then by
randomly writing 0’s and 1’s over the whole surface of the drive
platter(s). This completely removes all data on the hard drive enabling
you to pass on or dispose of the drive knowing that if the drive ends up
in the wrong hand the person(s) who obtain it are not going to be able
to access any sensitive data on the drive. The drive will simply be
blank.
Advanced Options
The final menu category of the HDM Suite is Advanced Options. From
within this section you can do all of your partitioning work, from
creating a partition to resizing and deleting un-necessary partitions.
Fig: 4 Partitioning is really easy with Paragon Hard Disk Manager
Suite 2008
As stated at the start of this review HMD relies upon a backup capsule
to protect any images of your hard drive. When you first create a backup
capsule you allocate it a specific size. Obviously, over time, you may
make incremental backup which, inevitably fill the available space
allocated to the backup capsule. By checking the options available in
the Manage Backup Capsule section you will be able to make adjustments
to the backup capsule by either enlarging or, if necessary, decreasing
the size allocated to the capsule.
Fig: 5 Make adjustments to the Backup Capsule using this wizard
The final advanced option is Boot Manager. This enables anyone running
multiple operating systems to choose which operating system to boot to.
With most dual boot operating system users nowadays preferring virtual
machine software, the use of third party boot managers is somewhat on
the decline. However, if you don’t want to use virtualisation software,
the boot manager option can be a useful addition to your arsenal of
maintenance tools.
Verdict
Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2008 contains a complete set of maintenance
tools designed specifically to keep your hard drive in tip top
condition. Regardless of whether you simply need to partition your hard
drive, clone or image a drive, defragment or securely erase the drive
contents Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite 2008 has a utility to complete
the job; making it an essential addition to ever computer users’ tool
kit.
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Ease of Use: 8
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Features: 9
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Value for Money: 9
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Overall: 9
