Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional is a comprehensive suite of tools that comes ready to handle all your hard drive management tasks.

If you need to reorganise your hard drive's layout, for instance, then the program will help you create, format, delete, resize or merge partitions. A host of helpful wizards keep the process simple and ensure your safety throughout. But there's also plenty of low-level power on offer for Windows experts: you're able to change a partition's cluster size, convert partition types, change file systems and more.

Once everything's in order then use the built-in Paragon Total Defrag to defragment your hard drive. The program will even reorganise and compact the MFT for an extra speed boost.

You can then protect your data with backup options that range from, say, just your emails or work documents, to a specified set of files and folders, a complete partition, or your entire hard drive.

Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional can create a very useful bootable disaster recovery CD, DVD or flash drive. If your PC won't start then launch this instead, and use its diagnostic and troubleshooting tools to get your system working again.

And new features in this version include exFAT and enhanced HFS+ support; automatic partition alignment for optimised performance; an MBR to GPT conversion option; support for 2TB+ and non-512B sector sizes; and a GPT Loader that allows Windows XP to access all the disk space of high capacity drives (2.2TB+).

You get most of these features in Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Suite, too, but the Professional does add many extras. In particular, it has many more features for backing up, restoring and otherwise working with dynamic disks; it can back up multiple volumes at the same time; you gain the ability to run scheduled and incremental copies; and there's strong support for working with virtual machines. It's easy to copy your current hard drive to a virtual machine, for instance: Virtual PC, VMware Workstation and Fusion formats are all supported.

A very powerful application that comes packed with hard drive management functionality