Paragon Hard Disk Manager Professional 11: Keep your drives in tip-top shape

Paragon's Hard Disk Manager Professional has long been one of the most comprehensive collection of hard drive tools around. The new version 11 extends even further, though, making it straightforward to manage even more types of drives.

Plug one of the new 3TB drives into an XP system, for instance, and normally you'd find you can only use the first 2.2TB. Hard Disk Manager 11 Professional includes a GPT Loader, though, that will give you complete access to the full capacity of the drive. The program can now work with Apple HFS+ formatted partitions, too, allowing you to create, format and resize them to suit your needs (and you get read-only access from Windows systems, too).

Paragon has at last provided support for Microsoft's exFAT file system, which is optimized for flash storage devices. Whenever you create or move a partition, Hard Disk Manager will automatically ensure it's properly aligned, optimizing performance.

Of course you still get all the features of previous editions: partitioning tools, a boot manager, file and image-based backup tools, a complete defrag utility, secure disk cleaning tools and more. Comprehensive virtual machine support allows you to mount virtual drives in all the major formats (VirtualPC, VirtualBox, VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion), and defragment, partition, back up or otherwise operate on them just like any other drive type.

And new FS Integrity and Data Loss Policy settings allow you to optimize the program for high performance, or to minimize the chance of data loss if, say, your system loses power at a crucial moment. Some of these features have their limitations. And so Total Defrag, for instance, doesn't provide a great deal of control over exactly how your drive should be optimised.

As a collection of tools, though, it's hard to beat, and Paragon's reputation for safety and reliability is why I use Hard Disk Manager to maintain my own system. If you'd like to sample what the program has to offer, then a Hard Disk Manager 11 Professional trial version is available now.

Get more Windows applications news like this at Software Crew.