Apricorn SATA Wire Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit ASW-USB-25 (White)

by Apricorn

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 4.5 x 1 x 0.2 inches ; 4 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B002EUCU3O
• Item model number: Y72551
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (79 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #559 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 1, 2009

Product Description

Apricorn’s SATA Wire is the ideal tool to upgrade your 2.5-Inch SATA or SSD drive in a Notebook or Netbook computer.Bundled with Apricorn’s EZ Gig II Cloning Software for PC’ and Shirt Pocket Cloning Software for Mac’s; this kit makes upgrading the main drive in your notebook straight forward and painless.If your notebook is running out of space or you are looking to upgrade to a faster, high performance hard drive or solid state drive, Apricorn’s SATA Wire is the perfect tool.Providing a USB connection to a 2.5-Inch SATA drive, SATA Wire enables you to upgrade your notebook’s drive in three simple steps. 1) Connect the SATA Wire to your drive and the USB port to your computer .Run the included cloning software to copy all of your data, email, settings and OS from your notebook to the new drive. Swap out your old notebook drive with your new one, and you’re done

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great the second time around..., March 31, 2011

By 

M. Jenson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Apricorn SATA Wire Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit ASW-USB-25 (White) (Personal Computers)

I have mixed feelings on this device/software. Let me start from the beginning... I purchased this kit along with a Western Digital 500 GB Scorpio Black internal laptop hard drive (WD5000BEKT). My situation was one where my laptop hard drive needed to be replaced because it was nearing capacity and was getting along in age. For your reference, my laptop is a Dell Inspiron e1705 with a Hitachi 60GB hard drive, the original from Dell. I liked the idea of being able to clone my OS and all my data from the old drive onto the new Western Digital hard drive hassle* free.

So after receiving my loot from Amazon, I started the process of cloning the old HD over to the new HD. Included with the SATA cable was the cloning software: EZGig III. Apricorn recommends running their software from Windows. I too, recommend trying this way first. It is possible to boot from a user created ISO file from Apricorn, but this isn't necessary if your operating system is behaving normally. So I unboxed the new hard drive, plugged it in and ran the software. Very simple interface and easy to use... pick your source drive (old drive), pick the destination drive (new drive) and...

-= STOP =-

BEFORE you start the auto-clone process, be sure to click into the advanced settings and manually adjust the partitions to your liking. My Dell had four partitions setup on the original Hitachi HD and EZGigIII was going to clone them as is. In fact, the first time around it did clone the old drive perfectly, but it also cloned the partitions as is and made my new precious Scorpio Black 500gb HD the same size as my old HD. It did not allocate the new space to the primary partition, it left it unallocated. (This set me back a couple hours while I used Gparted (a free, graphical partitioning tool) to remove the partitions from the new hard drive and start over.)
In EZGig, be sure to MANUALLY ADJUST the PRIMARY PARTITION to use all the new (unallocated) space on your new hard drive. If you don't do this, EZGig will automatically adjust the partitions according to the size of your new HD - so in other words, who knows what you'll get.

On my second try, based on the auto settings, it was going to increase the size of Dell's recovery partition to 68 GB!! Totally unnecessary. This is where the manual adjustments are crucial. Because I don't use the recovery partition for anything, I manually adjusted the recovery partition to the minimum size. I adjusted the primary partition (the one with your operating system) to use the maximum amount left on the new drive - around 430 GB. After this, the process was a breeze. The second time around, the old drive cloned over to the new drive and it worked flawlessly and best of all, the partitions were correct. For me, the process took around 50 minutes to clone around 63 GB over to the new 500 GB drive. Popped out the old drive, popped in the new one and it booted right up like nothing had happened.

So, now we come back to my mixed feelings. The product is great... it DOES work. The software is good... it DOES work. BUT if I didn't have the computer background that I do, I would've been screwed the first time around when EZGig incorrectly partitioned the new hard drive. Apricorn makes the process seem and sound a little too effortless, easy and foolproof. It is not necessarily foolproof... especially with the way Dell likes to partition their hard drives from the factory. If you're a Dell owner, you've been warned.

Lastly, be sure to download the newest version of the software from Apricorn's website. Don't assume the included CD is up-to-date because it probably isn't.

Even though my experience was a bit hectic, I still give high praise to this product. Just take your time and be sure to double check your partition sizes before you start the cloning process and you should be just fine.

Thanks to this $19 kit, I now have my 500 GB hard drive working perfectly and it has EVERYTHING copied over from the old drive.

It's like nothing ever happened!

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worked Great! Easy!, January 17, 2010

By 

senojjjjjjones - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Apricorn SATA Wire Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit ASW-USB-25 (White) (Personal Computers)

I'm no computer expert, and I had no trouble using this to upgrade to a bigger hard drive on my Acer laptop, running Vista. Took about 30 minutes to get everything ready to go, then about an hour to transfer everything on my old, full 120GB drive to a nice new 640GB drive. (I think it took about an hour, but I was gone for longer than that, and it was all done when I got back. After 30 minutes, it said it was 50 percent done, so I assume it took an hour, but I can't swear to it, your honor.) Then another 10 minutes or so to physically install the new drive into the computer. Seems to have worked perfectly. My computer is exactly the same, except I now have about 500 extra GB of space. I think the reviewer who didn't like it doesn't quite understand what this product is or what it's supposed to do. And I didn't need the internet to use it. The ONLY thing I needed other than this product and a new hard drive was a small jeweler's screwdriver to R and R the drive.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Send in the clones!, October 29, 2011

By 

Craig Hartley "hotdog" (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Apricorn SATA Wire Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit ASW-USB-25 (White) (Personal Computers)

Length:: 9:53 Mins

I just cloned and replaced a slow 500 GB laptop hard drive with a lightning-fast Crucial m4 256 GB solid state hard drive (SSD). I've never done this before and it worked great the first time, no sweat. The setup was a no-brainer. A few button clicks and the cloning process starts. It took about an hour for the cloning to complete. Afterwards, I just swapped out the hard drives. Done deal. All my data and programs work perfectly, including the Win 7 64-bit operating system, hidden files, and the full-on Photoshop CS5.

Apricorn even includes the USB/SATA cable with their software bundle. Who knew that this could be so easy?

This just might be the answer for making bulletproof backups, too.

By the way, there is a higher quality You Tube post available that Amazon won't let me link. Search "How to install a SSD into a TimelineX laptop" on You Tube.