There are many partition management tools available in the market and almost all of them have a very similar feature set. The EaseUS partition manager is one such tool. There are many useful features in this tool. The most notable one being that this tool has the ability to copy an entire partition or even the whole hard disk from one place to another! This means that if you have an OS and some software installed on your HDD or SSD, you can just copy it over without a need for a messy re-install or a reconfiguration. That is a very useful value add that makes this tool extremely productive. Let us now look at the tool in detail.
The UI is very well thought out and intuitive, the installation was clean and required minimum human intervention, I had enter the license keys manually, the only manual step. The color scheme is pleasing to the eye and does not distract the user from the main tasks related to partitions and their management. Overall, the design is almost perfect.
Now, to the actual features of the software, the engine under the hood. After the installation, it was very clearly able to show me the hidden recovery partition that my OEM had carefully kept for a rainy day! Not bad!
A partition can be hidden using EaseUS Partition master, when you do that, windows explorer or the OS is unable to see the partition. EaseUS Partition Master shows it when you open the Disk with it. This is a nifty feature that can be used for many practical applications, like sensitive data or personal information can be relegated to a conveniently hidded partition which no one can find! Very useful indeed!
There is a built-in partition explorer within the UI. Thus helping us to explore even hidden partitions within the EaseUS Partition Master itself. The explorer is similar to the windows explorer, just color coded to match the rest of the UI. See below
There are a lot of operations that you can perform with the EaseUS Partition manager. They are as follows
- Resize/Move partitions without data loss, like extending NTFS system partition without reboot to maximize PC performance.
- Safely merge two adjacent partitions into a bigger one without data loss.
- Convert dynamic disk to basic disk and convert FAT to NTFS file system.
- Convert primary partition to logical partition and vice versa: convert a primary volume to logical to create a fifth volume on a disk with 4 existed primary volumes.
- Wipe disk or wipe partition to permanently wipe sensitive data on disk.
- Support up to 2TB partition on MBR disk and 4TB partition on GPT disk.
In addition to these features, the partition copy wizard has a lot of useful and productive options. A few mentioned earlier, but let us enumerate all of them in one place to make reference easier
- Copy partition with fast file-by-file copy to protect your data.
- Copy entire hard disk to another or migrate OS to SSD without Windows reinstallation.
- Upgrade system disk to a bigger one with one-click.
- Support GPT disk/partition copy.
- Provide option to shut down the computer after applying any operation. This function is especially useful when you copy the disk which contains the operating system.
Using this wizard, you can perform several key tasks. One such task is partition copy, where you can copy data file-by-file, back up information on a GPT disk, and copy and resize partitions. This partition manager software did not meet our full expectations in this area because it lacks the ability to back up data to various storage devices such as a USB, CD or DVD.
If you are migrating from HDD to SSD this tool is invaluable and there is zero data loss or hassles after the copy. We migrated a Windows 8.1 installation from HDD to SSD smoothly using the copy wizard. Cross file system transfer was smooth too.
The most important module in the system is the partition recovery wizard, this one can be used to recover the data from a damaged, deleted or lost partitions. We tested it extensively and found that the automatic mode is fast and the manual mode gave granular control over the whole recovery process. Support for multiple file system types is also very good. Here are our findings
- Partition Recovery Wizard allows you to recover deleted or lost partitions from unallocated space due to hardware or software failure, virus attack or hard drive repartitioned.
- Two recovery modes in Partition Recovery Wizard: Automatic recovery mode is easy to use and requires minimal effort; Manual recovery mode gives you full control of the recovery process.
- Supports FAT, NTFS, EXT2 & EXT3 partition recovery.
There are other useful features too. EaseUS Partition Master provides a defragmentation feature. This feature will reorganize fragmented files sequentially on your hard drive. Depending on how fragmented your data is, this process should be relatively quick and painless.
Summary : The EaseUS Partition Master is a very useful Partition management tool that is clearly in the Top 5 partition management tools in the market. Having said that, it is not perfect, there areas that need improvement, like being able to back up a partition on a tape, DVD or a USB device. There are not many advanced back up settings. Overall we will rate this at 4.7/5 on our rating scale.