Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(46)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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!

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.

I attempted to run the this product to clone a Dell e1505 laptop running XP Media Center (Dell MediaDirect). Each time, the cloning process completed successfully, but I was not able to boot the new drive and worse, I am now only able to see 54GB on my 320GB drive. I returned the drive (WD 320GB 2.5" Scorpio Black drive), purchased another one, ran this product and the exact same thing happened. My understanding is that this product can NOT clone this kind of machine because of the invisible Media Center partition that Dell employs. Western Digital tech support says the drives are unrecoverable, and I have had to send both of them back. There are other posts online to the effect that this product does not work with Media Center-enabled machines, or any machine with "invisible" partitions. If this is true, I would recommend that the manufacturer clearly identify devices that are not supported. I'm sure the product is very good for the average machine, but this has been a very big inconvenience for me in that I have rendered two very nice 2.5" WD drives inoperable. WD was not able to recover the lost space, so the new 320GB drives are now 54.4 GB - the size of my old boot partition.

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.

I got this to use in installing a Crucial M4 solid state drive in my MacBook Pro. My goal was to clone the current hard drive onto the SSD and the swap in the new drive. Hook up was about as simple as it could be. I installed the software from the CD that came with the cable. When I tried to start the software, however, it crashed almost immediately. I am running OS X Lion. I went to the vendor's Web site and downloaded the latest version of the software, uninstalled the version from the CD and installed the downloaded version. When I restarted it, it worked.

I selected an option to backup my hard drive to the new SSD (after using the OS X disk utility to erase the SSD). The dialog came up showing the steps that it was going to take. I was encouraged to see that it was going to make the new disk bootable. The dialog displays a counter of files copied as well as bytes of data copied. The counts seem to update in bursts. At one point, the numbers had not changed in 15 minutes or so. I was beginning to wonder if there was a problem. I opened the OS X Activity Monitor app and looked at the disk activity display. It was obvious from the display that there was a lot of I/O taking place to the disk, so I left it alone to run.

It took about 4 hours to clone a half-full 512GB hard drive to a similar sized SSD. I didn't think the time was at all unreasonable.

I powered down my MBP, removed the bottom and swapped the new hard drive in. Powered it back on, and everything came back up with no problem. Even if I never use this again, it was well worth the < $20 price.

I have been backing up my laptop sata drives for some time as I cannot afford to be without a working spare. This is the most efficient, cost effective, and practical solution I have found. I've used a variety of USB cases, cables, and SW (including other Apricorn solutions) and this is the one I keep in my laptop bag as it is so easy to use. I have also used it with other SW without problems. I like it because I do not have to hum for cables or adapters.
If you need to backup desktop drives, I would suggest the Apricorn Drive Wire, which is the "Swiss army knife" of disk clone and backup solutions. But for backup of laptop SATA drives I prefer the Sata Wire.

I was getting ready to install a new hard drive into my laptop and needed to transfer the data from the original drive to the new one. After researching half a dozen alternatives I purchased the Apricorn system for two reasons. One the reviews which said how easy it was to use and second the great price on Amazon. Like the title says it was beyond easy. I ran the cd, rebooted the computer, connected the cable to the laptop and new drive and hit the run button. A full 120 gb drive with 4 partitions not only transfered the data but set the partitions with the same percentage of space as the original. And the whole process took just over an hour. I was stunned at the speed and simplicity. If you don't use this method you are making a huge mistake.

This is going to be a short review... this item worked, exactly as stated. Software was easy to use and worked perfectly. The cable is well made and simple to use... I couldn't be happier!

Very easy to use, small and easy to carry around, Most techs would find it nice to have.

I bought this emergently when trying to unsuccessfully install my HP mini 311 netbook software recovery disks to my new intel 80GB SSD: Intel 80 GB X25M Mainstream SATA II MLC Solid State Drive SSDSA2MH080G2C1

The instructions are easy to follow, I reformatted my original hard drive (250GB 2.5") to shrink its space down to stock set up. I used the Apricorn cable to plug my new SSD into a USB port. I ran the software included to clone. don't worry that the software says "250GB to 80GB" as by default it doesn't clone the free space, just the used space (18GB for me). It was done in 30 minutes, I swapped the drives putting the SSD in the HD bay of my netbook, and now the SSD works perfectly. Thanks Apricorn!