Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional

Product: Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional
Provided By: Paragon Software
Price: $99.99 MSRP

Introduction:

It's been a long time since I have sat down and analyzed a piece of software for a review.  As a computer tech and hardware analyst, I use a lot of different utilities - some free and some paid, that help me with my job.  I've used a lot of different hard drive management programs over the years to help people out, and I've become familiar with Acronis, PowerQuest and Norton utilities over the years, but never actually have I used Paragon's software until recently.

Quite a while ago, we were contacted regarding this software suite and I agreed.  Unfortunately, it fell by the wayside until recently.  I recently upgraded a few PCs here at BCCHardware HQ South and needed to image the drives that came with the computers onto fast SSDs.  Sometimes, this works like a charm with cheap (free) software, but other times it can be a pain in the backside.  I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try out some of the tools included with the Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional suite.  Going into this review, I had mixed feelings as I've had odd results with some other software at times.

In this article we'll cover some of the basic features of this suite.  We simply cannot cover everything it can do as it is very extensive in its support of many different types of hardware, images, virtual machines, file systems and more.  We'll do a few basic tasks and see how they shape up and if I could recommend this to a person in need.

First Look:

The Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Profession suite is nice and clean.  If you've used other hard disk management programs in the past, you'll notice that they all look similar in some regards.  In the image below, we are setting up to manage three different SSD drives.  We have our main OS on this machine on a 160GB OCZ RevoDrive 3 and are going to be working with both 128GB SATA drives.

In the images below, we show off a few of the options available for Hard Disk Management, Partition Management as well as a few of the "Wizards" that are available to simplify and speed up your life.  There are so many things to choose from, but that Professional version may be a bit intimidating for a new user.  If you need basic tasks, I would probably recommend the standard version of Hard Drive Manager 12.

Hard Disk Options

Partition Options

Wizards

Hard Disk Manager 12 gives you a lot of information and control over your disks.  It is great to be able to quickly and easily manage partitions, data and backups all from within one software program.

On the next page we'll cover a few of the features of the software before we continue on to testing.