Easeus Partition Master review: Professional Edition

It's a good feeling to have a nice big hard disk, but sometimes you don't want to dedicate it all to one operating system or one type of data. That's no problem: a hard disk can be divided up into multiple partitions, each of which behaves like an independent drive.Multiple partitions make it easy to keep your personal data separate from system files, and they can help if you want to install multiple operating systems: for example, let's say you want to try out the Release Candidate of Windows 7 on your computer, while keeping your trusty Windows XP installation available as a fallback. It's a simple matter of carving up your drive into two partitions, one with all your XP files on and another pristine and empty ready for you to install Windows 7. The OS installer helpfully provides a boot menu, so you can choose which partition you want to boot from, and each operating system will see its own partition as "C:", with the other one showing up as "D:".Partition management software has been available for more than a decade, and Easeus Partition Master Professional Edition is a relative newcomer to the field. But if you've used a package like this before, you'll be right at home: the interface is almost identical to those of existing applications such as Paragon Partition Manager and Acronis Disk Director, with a list of operations down the side and existing partitions displayed as both a list and a map in the main pane. It doesn't show quite as much up-front detail as Paragon's offering, but all the key information is here.Creating a partition is as simple as selecting a blank area of hard disk (in either the list or map view) and dragging a slider to select how much space you want your new partition to occupy. If the disk's already full, you can shrink down an existing partition to create some more space: once again, you can simply drag a slider to choose what size you want it to end up, or type in values if you want to be precise.