Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(148)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(30)

 

 

The 20 GB hard drive in my wife's notebook PC was almost full and we wanted to upgrade to a larger drive while preserving all of her programs, data, settings, etc. I did a search and found EZ Gig to be the preferred notebook hard drive upgrade/replacement solution.

It comes with excellent instructions and everything you need to get the job done (except the new drive which is purchased separately). It took less than 30 minutes to install the software and hardware, make a backup image of the old drive, start the cloning process, and install the new drive in the notebook PC. Obviously, the copying process can take a few hours, but that can be done at night or on the weekend when the PC is not in use.

This is an outstanding product and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to upgrade/replace the hard drive in their notebook PC.

This product has two components: a hard drive enclosure that lets you use an internal laptop drive as if it were an external USB drive, and software that lets you backup or clone a hard drive. Each of these two components can be used independently of the other.

I bought this product to swap my laptop hard drive for a bigger one. The way this is supposed to work is that you get a new drive, convert it into an external drive by putting it in the Apricorn enclosure, use the Apricorn software to copy the old hard drive onto the new one, then take the new drive out of the enclosure and put it into the laptop.

Unfortunately I couldn't get the enclosure to work. In most of my attempts, Windows didn't see the drive. A couple of times Windows saw the drive but then was unable to use it. I couldn't read from it, write to it, or format it. This happened on both a laptop running Vista and a desktop running XP MCE. I suspect the problem was power. The kit does not come with a power cord, so the new hard drive has to be powered over the USB connection. I suspect this just isn't enough juice for my new drive.

Fortunately, the Apricorn software is robust enough to clone the disk in two steps rather than one IF you've got another external drive available. First the software creates an image of your original disk in a file on the external drive. Then you put the new drive into your laptop and use the Apricorn software to copy the image from the external drive to the new laptop drive. Worked like a charm. [To be clear, the image it puts on the external drive is just a file; the external drive contents are NOT wiped out.]

I wish I would have thought of the external drive approach before I wasted two hours with the Apricorn enclosure. The end result was exactly right, but the problems with the enclosure soured the experience for me. I recommend this kit if you've got another external drive you can use during the process. If not, you better be sure you have the right power cable or know where to get one.

This product worked as advertised. Upgrading my hard drive was literally an EZ process.

I have a Thinkpad T40 with a 40GB internal hard drive (with two partitions) I wanted to upgrade. I bought a Hitachi TravelStar 160GB internal hard drive separately (obviously not included).

The process took three steps and less than thirty minutes:

Step One: Installed new hard drive into upgrade kit enclosure (this was very easy)
Step Two: Ghosted my original hard drive to the new hard drive (this took about thirty minutes and again, was very straightforward even with my partitions)
Step Three: Installed my new hard drive into my laptop and my old hard drive into the upgrade kit enclosure. (five minutes total time)

NOTE: I installed the software on the included CD-ROM onto my computer and ran it from there rather than booting from the CD-ROM directly.

The enclosure itself at first seemed flimsy, but after securing the hard drive with the included screws, it seems like a pretty solid unit. I am using my old hard drive as a bootable backup, not as an external hard drive, so I can't comment on that.

So after about thirty minutes of processing time, I booted up my computer, and lo and behold, it looked exactly as before, except with a greatly expanded hard drive.

I would recommend this product.

The Apricorn EZ Hard Drive Upgrade Kit easily saved me a day's worth of work. Since the hard drive in my Compaq laptop was reporting a SMART error that predicted imminent drive failure, Windows XP was taking about 20 minutes to boot. Worse, the system would not stay alive long enough to backup the data files, let alone all the applications that I had installed with updates. However, with the EZ Upgrade hard drive kit, I was able to boot from the included CD and then directly copy the old hard drive to the new drive in under an hour. After which, it was a simple matter of replacing the old hard drive with the new hard drive. Once done, the system booted perfectly. I wholeheartedly recommend this product to anyone else that faces a similar situation.

I was able to successfully upgrade (clone) to a new 500 GB, 7200 RPM hard drive on a Dell Precision M6300 running the 64 bit version of Windows 7. However, there are a few crucial pieces of information you should be aware of before you start. Some of this information is buried in the documentation and not readily apparrent or doesn't exist in their docs at all. Thanks to some of the reviews posted here I was able to complete the process without much trouble.

First, the reviews indicating this product does not work on Windows 7, 64 bit are not entirely accurate. Yes, it will not work if you INSTALL the software on a 64 bit machine but it will work if you boot directly to the cd. Be aware that if your cd does not preceed the hard drive in your boot sequence you will either need to modify your BIOS settings or easier yet, reboot and wait until the message appears that specifies what function key to press to manually change the boot sequence (F12 in my case). Be ready as you will only have a few seconds to press the key. If you miss you will have to wait until it completes and try again.

Second, 7200 RPM HDD's require more power than your standard 5400 RPM drive. The documentation is pretty clear on this. You will either need to use a power adapter or a USB "Y" cable (the kind with two USB connectors) neither of which are included with the original product. Some reviewers said they were able to successfully clone to a 7200 RPM drive using just the standard USB cable but you are opening the door to possible failures down the road. I was able to use a "Y" connector I had from another external drive.

Third, and probably most important, be prepared and don't panic in the event of a clone failure. The review by Stephen Hjemboe, "Yes, you can clone Windows 7", really helped me here as my first attempt to clone the drive ended in failure with a flurry of "sector write errors" after about 30 minutes or so. I had followed Apricorn's 3 step instructions; placing the new drive in the USB case (which is very easy by the way) and attempting to clone from the laptop to the USB drive. Thanks to Stephen's review which contained an undocumented work around, I didn't panic. I was able to successfully perform the cloning process. In a nutshell, his workaround is this:

1. Swap the drives before cloning. Basically, you want to place your new drive in your laptop and your old laptop drive in the USB case.

2. Boot to the cd, choose the clone option and select the "Custom" configuration in the Clone Wizard. This will take you through some prompts, most of which you can leave on the default setting. The prompts you are interested in are the ones that ask you to select the source and target drives. It is important that you specify the USB drive as the source and your laptop drive as the target. You will have a chance to review your settings before you kick things off. Make sure you see "2 -> 1" as the clone direction before proceeding.

3. Start the clone process. Depending on the size of your drive it will probably take an hour or so. It took me about 1:15 to clone a 150 GB drive. Note: the documentation recommends that you adjust your power settings (Control Panel | Power Options | Change when the computer sleeps) by setting your "Turn off the display" and "Put the computer to sleep" settings to Never. This will prevent the computer from going to sleep in the middle of the cloning process and potentially causing the process to fail.

Following this procedure, I was able to successfully complete the cloning process. The nice part is that once you are finished, you are all set to go. Simply exit out of the Apricorn software and the machine will boot up using your newly cloned drive. Everything looks exactly the same except for the fact that my hard drive is now over 3x bigger. Good luck.

Product gets a 4, Apricorn Support gets a 1!!

This product ships with a CD that is version 2 of the EZ GIG software. It does not work with laptops that have a separate partition for system recovery, but Apricorn support does not have a clue to that issue.

Once you get Apricorn to give you the key to the latest version, which is version 8, and create a install cd for it the software works fine.

Get the latest version before you start your upgrade. You will save yourself many hours of frustration.

If you have a Dell LapTop with Media Direct; do your home work. This product may work fine on other systems and I bet it does - BUT Dell is a living H*LL as the MediaDirect software on the HD is not copyable and corrupts the copying process. They (Apricorn) will send a work around but I have not figured it out yet (You can not talk to anyone). I have MediaDirect 2 on my HD. How do you know?

Go to MyComputer -RightClick- Storeage - Disk Management. And as you look at the Hard drives you will see the partitions if you only see three - then you have MediaDirect 2 - meaning it is invisible. And then you should just forget it.

If you read the reviews sorted by date you see a clear trend - THIS TECHNOLOGY HAS STOPPED WORKING!

We used to use it to upgrade our Dell laptop hardrives, but about 6 months ago it stopped creating bootable drives. Much time on the phone has not solved the problem...

To bad - it used to be a neat thing.

I ordered this and was excited to be getting a larger hard drive. The process went smoothly, then I put in the new drive and it said "hard drive failure". What the heck! I tried to run it again and guess what?... It does not even recognize it as a hard drive now.

Called technical support and they gave me about 100 things to do to correct it. Took about 18 hours. You would think with Dell computers they might put a caveat on their product that it doesn't work. Totally unprofessional!!

This product does everything that I needed from Norton Ghost. And it costs half as much as Norton Ghost. Plus it includes a nice laptop compatible drive enclosure.

It can easily move existing hard drives to image files stored on USB drives. It does this much better than Norton Ghost 12, which often crashes in the middle. The CD-ROM is bootable, so it copies outside of windows. The bootable disk worked fine with all USB drives that I used.

I use it to upgrade hard drives as well as create sector level backups of my Windows computers.