Quick Review: Macrorit Disk Partition Expert Home 2013

Dividing a hard drive into multiple partitions brings many potential benefits. Using "System", "Programs" and "Data" partitions may help to keep your files organized, as well as improving performance, and you’ll be able to install and use multiple operating systems.

Windows provides an applet to handle partitioning tasks (right-click Computer, select Manage > Disk Management), but it’s distinctly short on features. And that’s why you might turn to the lengthily-named Macrorit Disk Partition Expert Home 2013, which promises "advanced hard drive partitioning" and is free for personal use.

The program supports creating new NTFS or FAT32 volumes on MBR, GPT and 2TB+ drives. You can resize or move existing partitions from a single dialog. And there are tools to copy partitions; change their drive letters or labels; check them for errors; delete, format or wipe them, and more.

The interface for all this is much like most other partitioning software. There’s a list of your drives and partitions; select one, and you can choose whatever options you’d like to perform. Any changes aren’t applied straight away, appearing instead in a "Pending Operations" pane. But once you’re happy, just click "Commit" and the program will carry out each of your commands in turn.

This all worked generally very well in our tests. Performance was good, and the "Wipe Volume" option stood out in particular, offering several ways to securely erase the partition (fill sectors with zeros, ones, zeros and ones, the 3-pass DoD 5220-22-M and the 7-pass DoD 5220-28-STD).

We did also come across some issues. Oddly, the program offered only a very limited set of options (View Properties, Surface Test) for one or two of our system partitions. Okay, these were "EFI System" and "Reserved" partitions and should probably be left alone, but we’d still like the ability to wipe or delete them if necessary.

Another notable limitation is that you don’t get a "Merge Partition" option, and so if you do divide your hard drive into several partitions, there’s no easy way to reverse this later.

File system support is relatively limited, too, with support for NTFS and FAT/ FAT32 only. The program can’t convert partitions from one type or file system to another. And there’s no real help, maybe a problem if you’re new to partitioning.

This lack of documentation could mean we’re missing some plus points. In particular, Macrorit claims Disk Partition Expert is "the only one freeware with advanced technology of power-off protection and data disaster recovery", which sounds great. We’re not sure there’s much substance behind this -- we couldn’t spot any recovery tools at all -- but without further explanation it’s hard to say for sure.

Overall, Macrorit Disk Partition Expert Home 2013 isn’t bad: the interface is familiar, it’s easy to use, and there’s enough functionality to carry out most basic partitioning tasks.

The program doesn’t really offer any significant stand-out features, though, and on balance we would still prefer to use something like EaseUS Partition Master Home.

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