Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 review

Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 uses the same basic interface as Windows' disk software management routines. In fact, its data integrity checking and disk defragmentation tools are the Windows CHKDSK and Defrag utilities - only they run under Disk Director Suite.

There is a robust menu of icons arrayed across the top of the windows representing the available tasks. Duplicating that array is a text list of tasks along the left side of the window. Right-clicking on any of the drive representations also brings up a menu of similar tasks.

The process of installing Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 is unremarkable until you've just about reached the end, when a small box pops up telling you that the software is analyzing your hard disk partitions.

It's not a big deal if you're working off a single-drive system, but the more drives you have, and the larger their capacity, the longer this initial process will take. We had five drives installed - four of them 1TB and one of them 2TB - and itstill took only about two minutes, although it seemed longer.

Once it finished its analysis, Acronis Disk Director Suite said it needed to restart my computer. No fireworks, no brass band, no waving flags, just the computer equivalent of, "That's All, Folks!" There was no choice. And when we started Disk Director after the reboot, it again analyzed all our hard drives. In fact, any time you start a task that requires modifying or copying a partition, Disk Director will start this tiresome routine.

You can duplicate disks or partitions; you can also resize and merge partitions. We ran into a problem with a resize when Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 asked us what, if any, data from the original (full-sized) partition we wanted to place on the new partition.

There was no reason for the question, since we had only requested a resize. During the process, Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 showed a few write errors and finally aborted. When we went back and specified that no data be transferred, it completed the task without a problem.

When we tried to merge two partitions, Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 asked us to specify or create a folder to hold whatever data it found on the partition that was being merged. The process completed without a hiccup, although we would have preferred it if Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 had just merged the data on its own, querying us if it found a problem that needed resolution. It's not a big deal, just another small bit of tediousness.