Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2008 Suite Review

I received this Hard Disk Manager 2008 Suite free for testing purposes from Paragon Software, and am grateful for the opportunity to do so. However, I am sad to report that I was very disappointed in this software and the way it performed. In fact, I eventually came to distrust this software and uninstalled it out of the fear that it might damage my data or system files.

Paragon’s Hard Disk Manager 2008 Suite is a collection of utilities based around hard drive operation. It includes backup and restore functions, a defragmentation program, a data migration utility for transferring data to a new hard drive, the option to make a bootable recovery CD, a hard drive eraser, and a partitioning manager. While this may sound like a lot, most of it is nothing new to Windows users.

The partitioning part of this

software doesn’t do anything you can’t already do in Windows. It won’t let you convert free space into another partition, so you can’t split your working drive in two without losing all the data on it. All this program does is give you a new interface with a little bit better on-screen documentation than what you get in Windows. It’s the same way with the backup and restore portions. There’s just nothing new here. If you need something to wipe clean a hard drive, I recommend you download a free tool called Darik’s Boot and Nuke.

I did not have much luck getting this program to defrag the hard drive on my Compaq laptop computer. The problem I encountered was that when it boots into the defragmenter, it could not detect my keyboard. Since I had to hit a key on the keyboard to continue with the defrag, I was stuck. I eventually hooked up an external USB keyboard and got it to work, then it gave me an error saying there was a problem with my hard drive. Every time I tried to defrag, it said there was a bad sector and recommended I run chkdsk (a Windows system tool) to fix the problem. I ran full tests on my hard drive and found no problems, yet this program insisted there was one. I even tried running the ‘Check File System Integrity’ option built into this software and it gave no errors of any kind.

I find it odd that a program that calls itself a ‘Hard Disk Manager Suite’ would still recommend the Windows built-in system tools when it encounters a problem. I mean, why should I even need this software if, by its own admission, I still need the built-in (free) stuff to fix things? After all the problems I had just trying to make the defragmenter part of this software work on my laptop, I was too scared to try the other features for fear it would ruin my system. If this program can’t even do something as simple as detect a keyboard, why should I trust it with moving around my data files?

I was very disappointed with Paragon’s Hard Disk Manager 2008 Suite. Not only does it not even work properly, but it doesn’t do that much more than what you could already do for free with the tools built into Windows. It’s just a fancy repackaging of utilities you already have.

Vendor's website: www.paragon-software.com