EaseUS Partition Master: Partition management software review

With EaseUS Partition Master, a well-designed interface helps make technical partition management tasks easy to manage.

For most people, partition management tasks are not a routine activity. How often do you need to erase a hard drive, resize partitions or copy your operating system and data from one disk to another? These tasks tend to be done only when you are ready to get rid of a computer, install an additional operating system or upgrade to a new disk, respectively.

Fortunately, the team who designed EaseUS Partition Master provide a well-designed interface to guide people through highly-technical partition management tasks.

EaseUS Partition Master overview

On the main display of EaseUS Partition Master Professional Edition, you have six options:

• Partition Manager provides various maintenance and formatting utilities.
• Clone copies contents from one disk to another.
• Disk Converter modifies the fundamental format of a disk.
• Partition Recovery attempts to retrieve structure and data from a disk.
• Bootable Media creates a WinPE disk from which you may boot and then initiate additional partition management options.
• Toolkit accesses optimization and repair options, such as 4K alignment and rebuilding the master boot record.

The core Partition Manager screen lets you select a disk and then access several tasks (Figure A). The options include the ability to resize, format, delete or wipe the drive, along with several maintenance and naming options. The app lets you convert between newer NTFS and older FAT32 file system formats, newer dynamic and older basic partition disks, newer GPT and older MBR disk partition options, and, when using MBR, between primary and logical partitions.

Figure A

The wipe option is quite useful when you plan to dispose of a drive and seek to ensure that data on the drive is not recoverable. Standard practice in many organizations would be to select the wipe option and three passes to erase data stored on a drive before you dispose of it.

How to clone a disk on EaseUS Partition Master

Clone options (Figure B) allow you to migrate data from an existing drive to another drive. You might use this option when you want to replace an old, slow or small disk with a new, fast or larger drive. For example, over the years I have helped several clients replace a conventional drive on a laptop with a more modern SSD. This change can noticeably improve the speed that the operating system and applications load.

Figure B

EaseUS Partition Master makes this migration process simple, with a very clear, step-by-step approach. The system presumes that the primary drive installed on your system will serve as the source (Figure C). You may then select any additional drive attached to your system as the destination. The system displays basic information about each attached drive to help ensure you select the correct destination drive.

Figure C

As an additional safety step, EaseUS Partition Manager provides a prompt to convey that the cloning process will erase all data on the destination drive (Figure D). While experienced IT professionals likely don’t need this notice, this information can be invaluable for people who might be less familiar with how a drive cloning process works. Anytime data has the potential to be erased or lost, this sort of warning remains a prudent practice.

Figure D

The system also autofits data from one drive to another (Figure E). This ensures the partition sizes of your destination disk correspond to those found on your source disk. Again, this is a desirable default, especially when you might be moving from a small drive to a larger one. An experienced user might prefer to adjust the layout of the destination disk, but most often such an adjustment will not be needed.

Figure E

EaseUS Partition Master supports 15 languages

Importantly, you may use EaseUS Partition Master in 15 languages, including English (Figure F). While that may seem like a small feature, it is significant, since too often technical applications support a very limited number of languages. Multi-language support makes this a tool worth considering for a much larger percentage of the global population.

Figure F

EaseUS Partition Master’s pricing options

The company offers three EaseUS Partition Master pricing options. The best value for most people will be a lifetime license at $69.95, which provides one license for two PCs. The company also offers yearly ($49.95) and monthly ($19.95) subscription options, which you may sign up for and then cancel anytime. That said, the free edition also handles many partition adjustment tasks, but you’ll need to pay if you want to migrate your OS to a HDD/SSD, create bootable WinPE media or transfer files, apps and settings to a new disk or computer.

What’s your experience with partition management tools?

In my own work, I tend to turn to partition management tools when I need to upgrade a drive and when I want to erase data on a system I am about to decommission. Is a partitional management tool something you or your colleagues use often? If so, what tasks do you use it for? Let me know what you think of either EaseUS Partition Master or other partition management options with a mention or message on Twitter (@awolber).