Easeus Partition Master Server Edition 6 review

Disk partition management software is often a life-saver, especially since Windows has never had anything other than a very basic toolset. Along with most other vendors, Easeus offers its personal product free, but charges for its server version.

The only new feature in this latest version is support for the GPT (GUID partition table) standard, which allows the use of partitions and disks larger than 2TB. Along with this, Partition Master Server Edition (PMSE) offers a comprehensive box of disk tools for creating, manipulating, copying and recovering partitions, with support for both basic and dynamic varieties.

The main interface adheres to convention, with all disk tools presented in the left pane and partitions shown to the right in the main window. Choose a disk or partition and the available tools will be highlighted.

Resizing is a simple process: just pick up either side of a partition frame with the mouse and drag it to the desired size. A wrongly sized system partition or one running out of space can be easily extended using this same method.

The same process applies to moving a partition to another location on the drive - you can pick it up and move it to an area of unoccupied space. Sensibly, no changes are made until you hit the Apply button at the bottom or top of the interface.

Entire disks can be cloned using PMSE, which can be handy for moving a host system to a larger hard disk. When deleting drives they can be securely wiped to remove all traces of data, and you can select the number of write passes that should be made.

Disk operations were quite slow, although this will obviously depend on the size of the disks or partitions you're playing with, and where they're located. Copying a 50GB system partition to spare space on the same SATA hard disk took around 35 minutes, and using the recovery tool to scan and view the contents of a 1TB partition on another SATA drive took 20 minutes.

The PMSE media builder can be used to boot a sick server and possibly access its partitions and their copies. We created a DVD with the utility and had no problems booting a Server 2008 R2 system with it; we could see all available partitions and resize, move, copy and format them.

There are a number of provisos with the boot media, since it doesn't support RAID arrays. Our test server had a mirrored array, but only the member drives were detected as unformatted. GPT support also has issues, as Easeus states on its website that PMSE can only handle GPT disks up to 2TB, and the recovery boot environment doesn't support them at all.

Aside from these issues, we'd be happy to use Easeus when setting up and deploying servers. PMSE is better value and not so feature burdened as Paragon's Partition Manager Server, making it ideal when you're in a tight storage spot.

Author: Dave Mitchell