If you're juggling multiple operating systems, or you have multiple partitions you need to manage for one reason or another, you're probably familiar with Microsoft's built-in tool for partition management. It's simply called Disk Management, and for the most part, it does the job fine.

But I wanted to take a closer look, and it didn't take long to realize that this definitely feels undercooked. It's not uncommon for me to have issues with the Windows partition manager, and it really makes me wish there was something as effective as GParted that was also totally free. Unfortunately, partition management on Windows just isn't quite there yet.

It's so slow

Everything takes a while to load

The first thing I notice every time I try to use Disk Management is that it's a pretty slow tool. Just loading it for the first time takes a while as it tries to load information about all the disks and partitions on the drive. Refreshing the information equally slows things down, as does inserting a USB drive. It's a bit of a mess.

Plus, any action you try to take also takes a while to perform as the information gets updated. The whole thing feels like a sluggish experience.

Limitations and bugs

It's not a very flexible tool

Disk Management is a fully Windows-centric tool, and as such, it also has quite a few limitations that make it less than ideal for anyone who might be working with dual-boot systems or configuring an external drive. For example, when I try to format a partition, the only options I have in terms of file systems for internal disks are NTFS and exFAT, and if it's a USB flash drive, I can also do FAT32. That's it. No type of Linux-oriented partition is supported, whether it's ext4, Btrfs, or ZFS, which is a big limitation compared to something like GParted. Even Microsoft's own ReFS is still not available easily on every edition of Windows.

Windows also prevents you from resizing partitions past a certain point, even if there's a lot of free space. On one of my laptops, despite having over 300GB of free space, I could only resize a partition down to have around 200GB of free space, which severely limits how much I can do with my disk. There is a reason for that, as Windows says it's due to unmovable files on the drive, but other tools still manage to resize partitions to a larger extent. This may cause errors, but in a couple of my attempts on different laptops, I didn't notice any immediate issues, aside from Disk Management showing errors on one of them when trying to shrink a partition. Interestingly, it told me to use chkdsk to fix disk corruption, but that tool found no issues.

There are also a few bugs that I frequently run into when using Disk Management to clean up a USB drive. It seems to happen more often than not that when I delete the partitions on a flash drive and try to create a new partition with a given file system, I end up with an empty partition that's labeled as "raw" rather than having a proper file system. I then have to format it again to make it properly usable, which gets annoying when it happens almost every single time I try to manage my partitions.

No safety net

Changes are applied in real time

Perhaps one of the bigger problems with Disk Management on Windows is that every action you take is applied in real time as you do it. That may sound like a good thing, but when you're messing with things that might destroy your data, having the ability to backtrack changes and see a summary of all the changes you've made before actually applying them is very helpful so you don't end up losing anything important.

Disk Management also offers no way to back up or recover partitions. Cloning features do exist in Windows through the command line, but that's far less intuitive, and even then, it's not as flexible as some of the tools you can find elsewhere.

There are other options

But paywalls are a problem, too

Of course, even if you're stuck inside Windows, you do have other options that aren't the built-in Disk Management tool, and they do bring some benefits. Some popular options include EaseUS Partition Master or MiniTool partition Wizard, which you may have heard of partly because they also tend to advertise quite heavily.

But these tools do offer a better experience in many ways. They generally support formatting partitions with a wider variety of file systems, they queue your operations before applying them, so you can always make changes before committing to anything, and they may have cloning or recovery tools that make it easier to protect your data.

The problem with most of these apps is that some of the features you might want or need are locked behind a paywall. The free editions of these apps are already an upgrade, but they're still limited compared to GParted. For example, EaseUS Partition Master still doesn't support file systems like Btrfs or ZFS.

Windows needs a GParted equivalent

While you can use GParted Live makes it possible to manage partitions on a Windows computer, it would still be great to have the option to run a similar tool inside of Windows. Not everyone feels comfortable using a bootable tool such as this one, and having it right within Windows would make things a whole lot easier. Plus, GParted is totally free, which is objectively the best price. Hopefully something of this kind becomes possible on Windows at some point, but for now GParted Live remains the best way to manage partitions on any PC.