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

The product (both the enclosurer and the software) is very easy to use. Plus, Apricorn provides excellent customer services! Don't be afraid to ask them question Things to watch out for. You need to find out if your machine have HPA partition first (otherwise you will run into issues, where it would show that your new harddrive is the same size as the original one). Some BIOS have extra feature that might intefer with the device (when using the AC Adapter with SATA 7200 RPM HD). For example on Dell E-1505 I needed to disable USB Wake Support.
 
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This is a great little tool. I used it to change information into a new hard drive on my daughter's laptop. I transferred from a 40GB 5400rpm HD to a 100GB 7200rpm HD. I actually had no problems except for the fact that the bios for that particular dell (630m), would not recognize the extra 60GB. It's possible I missed a setting somewhere, but at least now the laptop performs MUCH better with the faster (and newer) hard drive. The software also allows you to set up the old unit as a back up drive, so that's what it's used for now. Pretty neat idea. Overall, a great value.
 
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Excellent "tool". I changed my noisy 100GB drive to 160GB without any issues just following the provided steps in manual. I highly recommend this set. All my programs, operating system is working even better then before.
 
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Needed to upgrade a sony harddrive, and keep operating system and all information, without restoring computer. Works as stated. Used the old hard drive as a backup source. Price from this supplier was great and shipping was very fast.
 
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This is as simple as it comes. I'm a computer technician so I've encountered a lot of cloning software. This, by far, is the easiest to use. Straight forward and simple. I did my cloning after I installed software within Windows. Just take note that the drive to be cloned must be the same size as your primary drive. If your newer drive is larger, it will only read what your original is. That is typical though. This software also includes the option for backing up your drive. Overall, software A+, drive enclosure, A+.. bargain for the buck! Happy cloning.
 
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Do not download a software to your computer, I did at first and it didn't get to finish the clone ??? and the second time I put the CD software in and boot up and it cloned about 40 minutes for 85G sata to 320G sata and I mean I am a rookie guy when dealing with the computer.
 
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Apricorn product is really great. I had Symantec Norton Ghost 12 before, but I had to install Norton in order to do a full back up which was impossible on my corporate laptop because I don't have the administartive privileges. With Apricorn it's possible to boot from their CD and then to copy a drive image on an USB drive, voila! Fantastic product, highly recommend it for its ease to use and efficiency!
 
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I was getting many "unable to write disc 2 sector xxxxxx (retry, ignore, ignore all)" errors in the first 2 tries of disk-cloning with the kit. I noticed the enclosure was vibrating (a 7200rpm drive inside) and when putting my hand on it, I could hear some scratching noise - not a good sign for a brand new disk. Just wondering how lucky I was for buying a lemon disk drive, I saw the 4 screw holes on the back of disk caddy. I tightened the 4 screws (which come with the kit) on and gave it another try. It was much better with the screws on - no more crazy vibrating and the cloning progress moved much faster. In about 1.5 hours, the whole process was done and I saw the "Congratulation...." message. Overall, I think it is a great kit for disk clone. The process would have been painless to me if the "Quick Start Guide" mentioned tightening 4 magical screws - a must step or the disk cloning gets screwed up.
 
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Used to upgrade my HP notebook. It did not give me an option to change partition sizes at first (and no error message or reason why). I ran a chkdsk on the drive and had some errors on the original (source) drive. After that, it worked perfectly and let me resize the new partitions as I wanted. Very easy to use on 'auto' mode, but still gives you a lot of flexibility in custom mode.
 
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I wanted to upgrade my laptop hard drive from 120gb to 320gb, so I purchased this kit and it worked great! Everything was cloned and upgraded a lot quicker than I expected. I highly recommend this product!
 
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I went from a 120 gig hard drive to 250 gig hard drive (thank you Ipod, MP3s, Audible, modern digital cameras, graphics and everything else that takes up a lot of space these days). It took an evening to complete the process. With little participation on my part, just set up the new hard drive in the hardware, run the program, and wait. Then swap out the two drives. The cloning of the drive is what took all of the time. This is a great product and much better then lugging an external drive everywhere. Works well with Vista, by the way.
 
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I bought this product at the same time I bought a new hd for my laptop. I wanted to preserve all the data, ie OS, documents programs etc. The setup and process is very easy to do and does a great job. I did run in to a problem with first getting a warning that while the program was checking the disc integrity that the partition has changed, but the program kept running anyway. Once the process was done, which took about 50 minutes I inserted the new hd into the laptop and got a disc read error. This happened a few more times. What I did to fix this was to stop sharing the original hd on my home network while the program was running. Once it finished copying the files to the new hd, I took it out of the enclosure, inserted into the laptop and am now up and running. All works well with the network now too. You can also put your old hd in the enclosure and use it as an external hd.
 
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It is quite rare that I am absolutely delighted and feel like I paid too little for a product, but this is one of them. The external USB drive enclosure allows you to use it for PATA (IDE/ATA) or SATA drives by putting the different connectors at opposite sides of the enclosure. The drive enclosure also is nice enough to use in the future for an external HDD. The software also was better than expected. For Windows, the software didn't need installed but could be booted into from the CD ROM. It also had a good interface that allowed customization and resizing the partitions before copying the drive. This package made the upgrade of a laptop hardrive painless, get one.
 
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The product exceeded my expectations...after I cloned the new HDD and swapped it into the laptop, it was magical to see the computer fire up and work like nothing ever happened! The only wrinkle for me was that for some reason cloning a 60GB hard disk took about 30 hours! probably a slow driver or something. However the wait was worth it! For some reason the XP version refused to install, but when I ran it from the bootable CD it began the slow, but sure cloning process. Perhaps it would have been quicker had the XP version worked with the XP drivers. No regrets though, I now have a laptop with 100 GB free.. plenty space to feed my photography habit!
 
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This was very easy to use. It only took about 10 minutes to transfer and install a new hard drive into my laptop. Great Product!
 
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Apricorn's EZ Upgrade Kit worked as advertised! It could not be any easier. I upgraded from a 40GB drive to a 160GB drive in a little over an hour (from opening the package to booting up my laptop with a 160GB drive). Well worth the cost. Drive enclosure is very high quality. If you need to upgrade your drive Apricorn's EZ Upgrade Kit is the way to go!
 
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The Apricorn EZ upgrade kit worked great. I upgraded my 60GB drive with a 160GB drive in the three easy steps they quote. The software made a direct image on the new drive in the enclosure and when I swapped the new drive into my laptop it booted up just like the old drive. Just start the process and walk away, but make sure to not have your computer go into standby mode or you will have to start over like I did. My only issue I have had is that I have not been able to use the old drive in the enclosure as a portable external drive. It is having a conflict with some missing software that I will get corrected someday. The product worked great for what I bought it for.
 
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The EZ Upgrade HD kit worked better than expected. The aluminum HD case is well worth the cost. I utilize the case and old HD as a backup now. the software was very simple and user freindly. Product recommended highly.
 
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This product has connections for both PATA/IDE Drives (pin connector), and SATA (edge connector) Drives. For XP: Software installation requires reboot. Then connect the EZ-UP UNIVERSAL (with your new drive installed) to the USB port BEFORE running the software. (Make sure the drive is fully "seated") Start the software and follow the screen messages and the cloning process starts after another reboot.
 
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Was easy to transfer data from failing hard drive to new one (XP - not sure what will happen now that I need to do XP to Vista)
 
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The Apricorn EZ Upgrade kit made replacing the hard drive in my laptop a very easy, straight forward process. It was easy to connect with good instructions. It made the entire process very simple. You do have to insure the new drive is seated firmly onto the enclosure connection which took some effort on mine.
 
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Works as advertised. However, users should be careful when they plug their new drive into the enclosure. I didn't plug mine in far enough and spent a couple hours trying to troubleshoot things when the cloning software didn't detect a second drive. (This despite the fact that the drive was turning and the light was on.) I assumed that the problem was lack of an external power supply and was cursing the company, of course! --Tech support set me right in less than 5 minutes.
 
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Its works Great and it's easy! If you can transfer a music file from one place (hard drive ) to another device ( MP3 player, External hard drive ) you can wheel your way through this in a breeze. It made going to a 160 GB hard drive on my Dell D630 happen in about 1 hour to boot with new hard drive and all old software working properly. THANKS for the timesaver Apricorn. I choose the in windows version. First Load the EZ Gig II software, choose which drive to clone to which and set back. It will actually reboot and does the exchange in a non windows based window. Much like Norton disk doctor if you've ever scheduled a surface scan with the fix errors checked. I'm so glad to have this tool, would use again, and comes with highest recommendation.
 
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This kit performs exactly as advertised. I followed the easy instructions, walked away, and on my return the drive was copied over. I then swapped drives and my laptop booted beautifully. There was a little confusion on whether you should run the program within Windows or boot straight to the CD ROM. Doing the latter worked best.
 
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The enclosure has a sweet snap together design that does not require screws to close. The software worked flawlessly upgrading my 4200 rpm 100 GB drive to a 7200 rpm 160 GB drive in under 2 hours. After the cloning the my laptop booted perfectly off the new hard drive now much faster and with the added storage space. The price was very nice and it was delivered in less then 5 days.
 
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Easiest disk upgrade I've ever done. Just make sure to uninstall or de-activate software first if you need to. I de-activated/uninstalled a handfull of applications just to be sure. Also, I had to re-activate Windows when I was done. Great buy, excellent quality, very simple to do the swap. I ended up using Actonis True Image because I already had it and was familiar with it. Although, the interface looks identicle to the EZ Gig II software, curious.
 
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My notebook HD intermittantly failed to boot. It took less than 2 hours to create the clone and replace the failing drive. Brilliant and easy to use. No more days and tedious hours spent reinstalling Windows or my software. I will always keep a fresh clone of my notebook HD. I will do the same for my other computers. I also will use the software to make disk images as added insurance against HD crashes.
 
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Excellent product. Easy to use and will do the job that it says it will. You will not be disappointed
 
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I had absolutely no problems. It is quick, easy, and flawless!! I upgraded my laptop hdd and now I have a nice ext hdd.
 
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Place your new laptop drive in the case. Connect it to your laptop. Start up the laptop with the boot disk that is included and follow the simple instructions. I used the expert menu because I wanted to maximize my C drive partition size and I am certainly not an expert. I did have one question about reallocating unused space to my C partition so I called tech support. I got right through to a tech and he answered my question in two minutes. Once complete I simply loaded the new drive into my laptop and everything worked perfectly, including my home and work network connects and my VPN stuff. Excellent product
 
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This has to be the easiest way to upgrade hard drives ever! The software is great, and the hardware makes it easy to use your old smaller hard drive as a portable storage device.
 
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These days very few products do what they promise to do. This one cloned my hard drive, as promised, in 7 minutes so I could upgrade my notebook. The clone worked perfectly once installed in the computer. Technical support answered the phone quickly when I had an initial problem but they couldn't solve it. The solution was, if your computer has multiple universal serial ports, if the first one doesn't work, try another one before giving up. The product worked perfectly with 3 out of 4 ports on my HP notebook.
 
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I considered getting a simple USB external shell for the new hard drive and the free trial of Acronis True Image 9.0 - It would have saved a fair amount of money, and probably would have worked fine. I ended up with this product instead. I upgraded two laptops with it: a Gateway Solo 5350 and a Sony Vaio FXA35. Both had old, slow, full hard drives. I put a new 7200 RPM Hitachi drive in each (80 and 60 GB, respectively). Using this software made the entire process seamless. The only bobble was when initially the Gateway's old hard drive had a read error. I ran chkdsk /f on it, and once I was confident the data could be read, I told the Apricorn software to ignore the read error. Worked perfectly, and all data is intact as far as I can tell. The trickiest part of the whole process was replacing the hardware in the laptops themselves. The software and external USB device worked perfectly.
 
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The installation of my new Seagate Momentus drive into my 5 year old HP Laptop went very smoothly. I encountered some problems in installation but the manual helped really well. The total time was a little of 2-3 hours of my time. Now I have an updated much speedier hard drive in my older laptop. One benefit is that I have my old system stored on the old drive as a back-up in case of future problems or moving to a larger drive.
 
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Not quite universal. lost a new 80GB hitachi SATa Trying to get it to fit. The "universal" is a real misnomer. When ordering a Hitachi SATA drive the "Universal EZ HDD Upgrade Kit For All Notebook Computers" was offered as a go along, but it is not compatible.
 
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I write backup software. This stuff is really good. I’m writing this to help others who might be in the same boat that I was in. My 60 gigabyte Toshiba HDD2183 disk drive was misbehaving. Microsoft XP was reporting a ton of “Event 51” errors. This, generally, means that your disk drive is dying. Stranger still, S.M.A.R.T. (the disk monitoring hardware in your disk drive) was reporting no out-of-normal conditions. The symptom that caused me to look at the Microsoft-supplied (on XP) event viewer was that my disk drive hard drive light was on 99% of the time and my Toshiba laptop was running VERY slowly. It took about 30 minutes to come up or shut down. The machine was barely usable. Keeping my fingers crossed, I ordered a 120 GB Western Digital from Buy.com as well as the “ez upgrade” product. Within fifteen minutes I was copying my dying disk to the new disk. I was worried because the transfer procedure (from the ez upgrade boot disk) seemed to be running at full speed. Note, the ez upgrade hardware turns the “new” disk into a usb drive. To work, you’ll need two working usb ports (one for power and other for data).. I replaced the old disk drive with the new 120GB drive. I’m back at full speed and there have been no Event 51’s in my event log. I do offer a word of caution. Like I said, I write backup software. I wish that “ez upgrade” gave us a little more technical information about what it’s doing. Is it using Win PE (a Microsoft product quite dissimilar to Win CE) to Bart’s PE? What is is using to copy data? Is it doing it at the cluster level? That would be my guess … but that is very tricky, too. Nonetheless, the product appears to work very well and I’ve had no problems in the hour since I cloned my disk drive.
 
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I had a 30 GB HD 5400 RPM at 29% free space. Getting VERY sluggish. Bought a 80 GB HD 7200 RPM. Bought the EZ-UP-UNIVERSAL for laptops. As usual, buy.com always comes through with great products. The product works great. Boot through the disk as suggested by-passing the OS. With 2.0 USB and booting through CD ROM disk it took less than 30 minutes to clone and less than 45 minutes in all. WOW!!!!! Forgot what speed was. Great product. Very Highly Recommended. By the way my laptop is a Compaq Presario 1500 series. I'm soooo happy now. Thanks Buy.com and APRICORN!!!!! A big 5 Stars to you.
 
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Installing the hard drive into the case was a snap. The software didn't recognize the clone drive initially but a bit of help from Technical Support quickly corrected that. Data transfer took about three hours but ran completely unattended. When I put the cloned drive into the laptop it fired up and ran as though nothing had changed except that everything loaded faster. Perfect function but the instructions could use some improvement. Having a good use for the old drive is a real plus. As an external drive the old HDD operates just fine off of USB power. No need to find an extra 110V outlet or haul along the power cord.
 
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I upgraded my 20gb drive to a 60gb drive in my Thinkpad T21. This product worked perfectly - I have only USB 1.1 in my laptop - and it worked fine with that but took longer than USB 2 would have; approx 6 hrs to transfer 15gb of data using USB 1.1. I took all the defaults. This would work MUCH faster if you have USB 2. But no big deal, just walk away and let it do its job!
 
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My HD on my laptop computer became very ill. After running about an hour, it would make a grinding noise and windows would stop. If I tried to reboot, I got the message "non-system disk". I bought this product to transfer the information from the old HD to a new one. And it worked perfectly! In less than 45 minutes (10 minutes were for installing the HD in the Apricorn box and transfering to the LT after copying). I now have a new 100g HD (up from 60g), didn't have to spend several hours loading the recovery disk, upgrading to sp2, loading all the other software, restoring My Documents etc. This product was well documented, easy to use and worked perfectly as expected.
 
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This is a great product. You can upgrade you laptop HD or use the adapter for USB external HD. In any case the cloning of your HD is easy and painless. Depending of the speed of your laptop, the cloning process is 3 to 6 hours. But the end result is, for me, a much larger capacity and 7200rpm drive. Also my laptop runs faster than before.
 
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Product is very easy to use and performs as advertised. My notebook (a Sony VAIO) booted up flawlessly after the cloning/upgrade process, and I now have my old hard drive as an external USB 2.0 drive.
 
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