» Apricorn EZ-UP-UNIVERSAL EZ Upgrade Universal Hard Drive Upgrade Kit

Apricorn EZ-UP-UNIVERSAL EZ Upgrade Universal Hard Drive Upgrade Kit Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Saves old notebooks
Comment: I purchased to increase the hard drive capacity of a Dell 8200 bought in 2001. And it worked but only after I purchased a power adapter from Apricorn. My 8200 USB 1.1 port could not handle the power demand of the Western Digital hard drive. And that port was slooowww. It took 15 hours to clone the 60 GB OEM drive. But both limitations were weaknesses of this old PC so the Apricorn earned the 5 stars. The Apricorn was extraordinarily easy to use. I changed notebook boot order so it booted from the Apricorn CD. Then I followed the instructions step by step. I was able to clone my old drive which had been split into two partitions onto the new 250 GB drive with two partitions--one for OS and programs and one for data. After cloning, I returned the boot order to it original order.
By the way, the Apricorn Univeral hard drive upgrade kit works with both SATA and PATA drives.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: BEWARE of PITFALLS
Comment: This kit offers an easy way to replace the hardrive in a laptop, but there are a few pitfalls that one needs to watch out. Apricorn offers little or no help to the users.

(1) Many people with pre-XP system have trouble because they're not equipped with USB 2.0 ports. The old USB 1.1 ports are about 40 times slower and it also doesn't supply enough power to run many external drives. So some people complain about the disk copying process take forever and some couldn't get the drive to respond at all. The power problem can be solved by adding an external power supply that plugs into the enclusure. The data rate problem can be solved by getting a PC card that provide USB 2.0 ports on the old machines.

(2) Many users, including myself, experienced a problem using the newly cloned drive: an error message upon removal an USB flash drive or hardrive. After getting no help from Apricorn, I did find a solution on the web. It is caused by some bugs in the cloning software, but it's unclear why it happens to some people and not all. If you have this problem, see message #69 at this URL for the fix.
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I deducted 2 stars in the rating because (1) the cloning bug has been known for at least 18 months but it's still in the kit I bought 2 weeks ago; (2) it is misleading to advertise the kit for older systems running Win2000 without telling people some extra parts are needed, e.g., an extra power module or a USB 2.0 PC card. For people who don't run into these problems, it's a 5-star product. For those who do, it's a 1-star.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Perfect!
Comment: I used this for my toshiba laptop to swap my hard drive. Just wanted to clone everything. It worked PERFECT the first try. Just like they say Easy as: 1,2,3!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Recommended, with an asterisk
Comment: I'm pretty happy with this product. It did a great job of imaging my Thinkpad hard drive so that I could upgrade to a newer, larger, quieter ;) drive.

But it comes with two warnings:

(1) You can't use it to clone a dual-boot Macbook, because the Windows-side software won't proceed when it sees that one partition (the OS X HFS+ partition) is in a format it can't handle;

(2) It works poorly with Macbooks in general, or at least my Macbook. This may be an Apple problem (underengineered USB port), but if you own a Macbook, look elsewhere.

Five stars because upgrading my Thinkpad with this item was a breeze, and tech support at Apricorn eventually explained the problem.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Solid program and case
Comment: Easy setup and install. The one thing I didn't know is that the CD is a bootable cd and you can copy that way as well, which was a bonus. The down side to using the program through the bootable CD is that you can't specify the new partitions without losing space as unpartitioned. Simple drive enclosure that allows either EIDE or SATA drives simply by flipping the drive around with connectors on either side. USB powered or can be powered with an AC Adapter (not supplied though). Although I haven't tested it yet, I think the software will allow you to use any USB externally enclosed drive, so you could clone a 3.5" as well.
All told, a solid program with a well built drive enclosure and usb cable.

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