Neither are perfect for every customer, and this is why MiniTool’s pricing structure is what first caught our attention. Paragon also has one option for home users that costs $40 USD.

Acronis offers exactly one “take it or leave it” option that costs $50 USD. While the features this handy little program offer certainly are interesting, if not unique, what really sets this application apart from the competition is its pricing structure. Considering MiniTool has been around since 2001 we highly doubt that this company is another of those flyby nights which promise the moon and delivery very little so that twenty dollars is a great investment. All features which have helped differentiate the bigger players from the various ‘others’ that have cropped up over the years…and usually disappeared equally fast. Equally important, this program features free add-on modules which allow for everything from Undelete, to Data Recovery, to even unformating an accidentally formatted partition. Namely you can do almost everything Acronis or Paragon offers including surface testing, drive and partition cloning, booting from an ISO, etc. This fully featured program may lack the name brand recognition, and marketing budget, of the competition but this Canadian made program offers a wealth of features in one simple to use application. To really get a fully featured toolset classically meant opting for either Acronis DiskDirector, or Paragon’s Partition Manager.Īnother lesser known, but equally powerful, option is MiniTool Solution Ltd’s Partition Manager.

Open Source programs like GPart and the like work OK, but they do have their limitations. All these are tools that everyone one should have in their toolbox, and yet to get them you have had to either spend a lot of money or deal with free ‘open source’ options. The ability to clone a partition from one hard drive to another, the ability to extend a partition without first nuking the data and starting from scratch, even the ability to do low level ‘surface’ testing to see what issues a drive really is suffering from.

As advanced users know there are certain storage related tools that Microsoft simply does not include with their Operating systems – and probably never will.

Minitool