PowerQuest Drive Image 7

Performance tests were first carried out on a 900MHz Celeron system with a pair of 15GB ATA/100 hard disks and running Windows XP. Ghost 2003 proved to be marginally faster: we created an image of a primary NTFS partition with 4.5GB of data on to the second drive in 12 minutes, including reboots, whereas Drive Image took 13 and a half minutes - and no reboots. Compression also plays a part, as imaging a primary partition on a Pentium III/866 running Windows 2000 to an external USB 2 hard disk saw Drive Image return a speed of 6.2MB/sec with standard compression: this dropped to 2MB/sec with high compression selected.

During testing, however, we also found Drive Image 7 easy to use and the improved device support is a valuable addition. A number of features have been dropped from this version, but the new PQRE rescue boot process is much more sophisticated, and the ability to take hot images of any partition alone makes it a worthwhile purchase. Symantec will have to come up with something special with Ghost 2004 if it's going to beat PowerQuest at the disk-imaging game.

Author: Dave Mitchell