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Acronis Disk Director Suite 10: Average-performance Disk Manager
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You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Most disk management operations combined in one program, split/merge features, easy type conversion, user-friendly, reasonable price.
Slow defragmentation speed, help doesn't have search enabled, had at least one instance when it 'encountered an error' on Windows XP!
Unlike Acronis' True Image backup/recovery program, the Disk Director Suite seemed to be pretty average performance-wise. Defragmentation of a 80GB logical partition with 75% free space took 20 minutes to progress only 6%! This is because the software uses Windows XP's own generic defragmenter.
On the other hand, the interface is user-friendly, with an Explorer-like GUI. Switching between auto and manual modes gives flexibility of operation. Whenever a drive is chosen for an operation, it is locked for read/write access, providing protection against data loss.
Many disk operations are built into the package: defragmentation, partition creation -- from unallocated or free space of an existing partition, free space increment -- not compression, just a swap of available space from other logical drives, deleted partition recovery, copying or moving a partition to an unallocated block that can be obtained by resizing another partition, etc. It's like operating with files and folders! Copy, move, merge, split, rename, change drive letter, hide, edit partition table, convert to a different file system -- all these can be performed without data loss!
One useful feature is the ability to format to other types such as Linux Swap. Generic Windows XP formatting does not allow this, neither does it detect Linux partitions. It also allows you to install multiple operating system easily and boot from different partitions.
To summarize, Disk Director Suite 10 comes with a lot of functionality, however operation speed could be further optimized. I don't like my PC running defrags all night long!
The price is reasonable, a bit on the high side, but the $21.77 deal from Amazon seems very attractive.
Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 is a nice package with all disk management utilities included in one, and for a good price too! The down side is the slow speed of operation.