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Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2008 Suite
Date: 2008-02-20 | Author: Björn Endre
Company: Paragon Software Group
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INTRODUCTION
Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2008 is a program suite from Paragon that promises to make everything around the hard drive easy. It can defrag your hard drives, make it easy to take an image and restore it and even make sure that any data you want removed stays removed. After using it for over a month my personal feeling is that this is a great toolkit for both novice and experienced users. Read on to find out why.
ABOUT PARAGON
Paragon was founded in 1994 and has a mission to “provide efficient and effective corporate and enterprise level solutions in storage management, continuous data protection and hard drive management”. In their product portfolio we find a wide variety of products that all center around the hard drive and the data stored on the hard drive.
FEATURES
Paragon Disk Manager 2008 can be bought either as a physical product or as a download from Paragon. The version I am reviewing here is the downloadable version but there is no difference between it and the physical CD-version.
General Features
- Complete set of tools for overall HDD maintenance in one suite.
- Imaging and Partitioning
- Optimization and Defragmentation
- Recovery
- Backup/Restore
- Disk Wiping
- Includes simple wizards for beginners and comprehensive tools for advanced users
- MS Windows Vista support
Partitioning Features
- Basic Partitioning (Create, format, check file system, delete, hide/unhide, mark as active, assign drive letter, etc.) Wizards and Dialogs.
- Resize copy and undelete partitions functionality.
- Disk Editor
- Operations with MBR
- Drive integrity check
- Hard Disk surface test
Boot management Features
- Multi-boot environment
- Default settings and boot on timeout
- Hidden mode
- Easy activation/deactivation
Imaging and Cloning Features
- Hard Disk/Partition Copy
- Incremental Copy Option
- Copy with resize
Defragmentation Features
- Monopoly Access mode defragmentation
- Filesystem optimization strategies by three parameters (file date, file size, directory order)
- Optimization of the page file and the hibernation file allocations.
- MFT defragmentation
- Low free space defragmentation (less than 1% free space required)
- External USB device defragmentation
- Shrink MFT feature
- Big volume support ( >128 GB)
- RAID suppor
General Backup/Restore Features
- Backup Data and System to an archive
- Restore Data and System from an archive
- Restore From Recovery CD
- Backup Archive Compression
- Backup Archive Encryption
Supported Backup/Restore methods
- Backup/Restore to/from a spare drive, a partition, a Backup Capsule
- Backup/Restore to external USB or FireWire HDD device
- Backup/Restore to CD/DVD
- Backup/Restore to Backup Capsule
- Bootable archives on CD/DVD
Advanced Backup/Restore Features
- Paragon Hot Backup support
- MS VSS support
- Choice of Hot Processing method
- Backup Capsule management
- Burn existing archives to CD/DVD
- Restore partition with resize
- Extract separate files from backup archive
- Restore within BTE environment
Rescue Kit Features
- Recovery Media Builder
- Recovery CDs
- Recovery CD: Simple Restore Wizard
- Recovery CD: Network support
- Three recovery environments
- File Transfer Wizard
Wipe Features
- Wipe partition/drive
- Clear free space
Hardware Support
- CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW
- DVD±R Double Layer Support
The program consists of a large number of sub-modules that do all kind of funky stuff. If you have used any Paragon products before you will certainly recognize the modules as they are present in a host of other products from Paragon. In fact, after looking over the feature set of other programs like Paragon Partition Manager 9 and Paragon Drive Backup 8.5 you see that Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2008 takes modules from these programs as well as other Paragon programs and combine them into one product. This means that Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2008 will not have every feature of all these other programs but instead (hopefully) the most usefull ones all combined in one program.
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Disclosure: Bjorn3D review products are sometimes provided by the vendors who manufacture the hardware. Review samples are in some cases retained by the reviewer that reviews the product for further comparison to other similar products. Companies that buy ads on the site do not get any special treatment when it comes to reviews and any ad-sales are not connected to the reviews or the review scores.