Paragon Partition Manager Free Edition (64-bit)

Paragon Partition Manager 2014 Free aims to make it easy to create, resize, reformat, and delete hard disk partitions, but its wizard-based processes compromise flexibility. Advanced users may need more control than this software's algorithms permit.

Pros

Mostly automated: Paragon Partition Manager scans your disks to identify existing partitions and available free space. All you have to do is check some basic options and let the software do the rest.

Mac and back: A built-in NTSF/HFS+ Conversion Wizard can make your Windows disks accessible to your Mac and your Mac disks accessible in Windows.

It's free: Users have comparatively few choices in freeware disk partitioning tools, so Paragon's entry is certainly welcome.

Cons

Complicated documentation: We're not sure which is more complex; the software's algorithms or the documentation explaining them.

Too little control: The software looks for the first disk to create a partition, then the next, and so on. The only available partition space it found was on our C drive (which we did not want to change) not our 320GB D drive or the 650GB external drive with 93GB of free space we wanted to partition.

Chaos potential: Inexperienced users who want to create a separate partition for their music files (for example) on their C drive might accidentally wipe the wrong partition (Paragon recommends backups; we strongly agree).

Bottom Line

Partitioning and managing disk drives requires care and attention to detail, and experienced users will probably want more flexibility and control than Paragon Partition Manager 2014 Free offers. But for basic or infrequent operations, it'll do fine.