Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8.5 PE

The final, and smallest, segment of Disk Manager 8.5 is the Drive Copy utility. It's limited in the Personal Edition, with basic copying of partitions and hard disks via a simple wizard, but it does support external disks as well as those inside your PC. You can check the integrity of file systems and create a bootable copy CD, which enables drive copying independent of the OS.

This edition of Hard Disk Manager 8.5 is mainly a disk-partitioning utility, and in that respect it does the job very well indeed. The wizards make it hugely accessible, although it still isn't perfect, and we like the push towards more OS and file system independence. The backup options are a useful extra for keeping things in order, although we'd still recommend using a proper file backup program such as Ghost or True Image along with it. But when you consider the power and range of features on offer here for just £34, it's well worth the investment for users on a budget.

Author: David Bayon