Paragon Hard Disk Manager 5.5

Your computer's hard disk can be divided into partitions to make it easier to manage. HD Manager allows you to change and adjust these partitions to suit your purposes. Alternatively, if you have only one partition, you can use HD Manager to split it into two or more.

Why would you want to do this? Suppose you wanted to give Linux a try without upsetting your existing system, or wanted to create a separate space to store music or video clips. Normally you would have to wipe the whole disk and start again from scratch, but HD Manager allows you to rearrange things while leaving everything else as it is.

It has a simple enough menu system: you select the options you want, and tell it to apply the changes. Rebooting may be needed, in which case your partitions will be in place when the computer restarts.

In our tests it worked very well, being able to change the type of partitions, and combine, split and delete partitions.

Of course, there is always a risk of data loss, so you should always back up files before doing anything this technical, but if you find yourself needing to make changes to your hard disk, HD Manager is a good buy.