AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Editor's Review

Manage and maintain your drive's partitions with this handy, free Windows storage utility.

The price of SSD's is coming down. At about $1.00 per gigabyte, putting an SSD in your notebook PC is becoming more and more realistic. Upgrading from smaller SSD's to larger, faster SSD's isn't as financially painful as it used to be. The problem, though is finding a decent drive migration and management tool. This is one of the biggest reasons why I like Aomei Partition Assistant Home Edition. It’s a partition and drive management tool for Windows.

AOMEI Partition Assistant Home Edition is a completely free partition manager. It carries out hard disk and partition management, advanced system optimization and easy copy and partition recovery to keep your computer running. The app works in both 32bit & 64bit versions of Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows 2000 Professional. It has the ability to resize and move partitions, migrate an OS to either an SSD or hard drive, to merge or split partitions, to allocate free space, to copy partitions, to copy a disk and to recover a partition on MBR and GPT formatted disks. The app also includes the ability to create a bootable CD to ensure data and system safety. As an added bonus, it includes a free, portable partition manager portable. With it, you can copy the installation directory of AOMEI Partition Assistant Home Edition to any device, including a USB flash drive, a portable hard drive, etc.

Pros: Free, mobile edition

Cons: Care needs to be taken when adjusting system and recovery partitions, as changing them may make them unbootable.

Conclusion: I was really surprised with Aomei Partition Assistant Home Edition. Its surprisingly easy to use. It has a number of different features that you find in similar, paid apps, but I haven't seen any other tool with a mobile edition. That's pretty cool.

The only down side, if you can even call it that, is that tools like this really require you to mind your P's & Q's. Migrating or moving partitions around a drive, or to a different or larger drive, isn't for the faint of heart. You've got to be careful and insure that you don't change recovery or system tool partitions, as doing so may render them unusable. Making modifications to boot loader partitions, like the ones on a Mac that manage both OS X and Windows operating systems may also make your PC unbootable.