14 DAY TRIAL // The professional version of Aomei Partition Assistant has been designed as an easy to handle, comprehensive approach to disk partitioning.
There used to be a time when it would have been tough to get your hands on a good partition manager that did a great job and was also easy to handle. Those days are long gone and, now, you can even find free tools that can split up large disks into multiple partitions.
However, Aomei Partition Assistant Professional is capable of more than this, since it comes in handy if you want to move and resize partitions, create new ones, merge volumes or wipe them clean.
For the average home user, there are two versions of the program, a free one, Home Edition, and Professional. The latter has more features unlocked, yet the differences between them are not too steep.
What separates them is the inability of the free version to convert a basic disk to dynamic or a GPT one to MBR. Furthermore, it cannot add a drive to RAID or remove it. The paid product can also be used on a larger number of Windows operating systems. Check this page for the full comparison chart.
The price of the Professional edition is $39.00 (€31.78), but you can test it for free if you’re okay with the limitation: it can be used only with 100MB partitions. Our tests were conducted on the full version of the application, though.
Looks are not impressive, but options are arranged in an intuitive way, so using the program should not be a problem, regardless of your computer skills. Operations can be initiated from the disk view screen, as well as from the drop-down menus available on the left hand side of the application window.
Aomei Partition Assistant Professional offers a wide set of options, which include everything from resizing and moving the selected partition to splitting, merging, creating a new volume from unallocated space, formatting, deleting and even sanitizing. Additional choices let you hide a partition in Windows, or change its letter and label.
Managing the size of a partition is a simple job, as the options available let you define a new size either by punching in the values yourself for more accuracy, or by dragging by the graphical representation until the desired result is reached.
However, it looks like the bug we noticed during our previous testing of the program is still present, when resizing the partition. So the value will slightly change when pressing the “Ok” button.
We also noticed that sometimes, when moving a drive, it cannot be pushed all the way so that there is no unallocated space before it; in this case, you have to punch in the value for the unallocated space before or after.
One of the new functions introduced in version 4 of the application is partition splitting. The option simply lets you divide one drive into two partitions, equally sized, if possible. You still have control over the volumes as you can resize them as you see fit. No unallocated space can result from this operation.
Allocating free space from one partition to another is also a new feature in this version. Simply put, this option lets you increase the space on a drive by taking it from another.
The advantage of this is that the drives involved do not have to be next to each other. The only requirement is that they be on the same disk. Once you set the amount of space to be transferred, Partition Assistant Professional automatically creates all the intermediary operations that need to be done in order to reach the desired result.
Although the disk view is updated as soon as you make a change, tasks are not executed immediately. They are listed under the “Pending Operations” menu and you can undo the actions one by one or discard them all at once.
This way, you can set all the actions at once and the application proceeds to executing the tasks in the same order they were defined.
Although we did not have any trouble resizing and moving drives with information on them, we do not recommend initiating such actions without making a backup first. This can be done straight from the application, through the “Copy Partition” option.
You can copy only the used space on a drive or make a sector-by-sector copy, which includes all sectors, free or occupied.
Aomei Partition Assistant Professional has not changed much since the previous major version, but it brings two new options (merge/split partition and quick allocate free space) and supports 4TB GPT drives. Also, it now integrates flash drive support and can run on Windows 8 operating system.
Allocating free space from one drive to another automatically creates all intermediate actions to reach the desired result.
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Note: we have 100 licenses to give away for Aomei Partition Assistant Professional 4.0. In order to grab one you should drop a post in the comments section below, with some interesting lines about the application or your experience with partition management software. The campaign will run for one week.
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