Apricorn EZ Upgrade IDE Universal Enclosure Kit user reviews

Pros Buy the hard drive you want. Not included in kit.

Cons I have no objections.

Summary I bought this kit to upgrade my laptop with a larger and faster drive. The documentation was easy to understand and follow through to
completion. The EZ Gig II imaging software worked without a hitch. EZ Gig II will also work on your desktop computer. Apricorn's upgrade kit helped to make the hard drive upgrade nearly effortless and absolutely
hassle free. All you need to figure out on your own is how to get your old hard drive out of your laptop. You will then have a nice portable USB 2.0 external hard drive powered by host PC. No power adapter is required but one was included in the kit.

Pros Cool enclosure and easy to use. Creates external HD with enclosure and old drive.

Cons Better documentation

Summary I upgraded my Dell Inspirion 600m from its standard 40 gig hd to a Seagate 100 gig momentus notebook hard drive. Two issues I ran into. 1) make sure you run a check disk and correct any errors prior to cloning and 2) when you switch out the drive there is an adapter that connects to the drive pins, make sure you remove adapter from old drive and put on new drive. I am not a very technical user, so if I can do it so can practically everyone.

Overall, there just needs to be a slightly more detailed instruction which goes into running check disk, defrag HD and adapters that may need to be transfered. Slick product though.

Pros Very good manual, works exactly as described, produces results first time

Cons None that I have found

Summary I originally saw this product demo'ed in a Brian Cooley How-To segment. I decided to upgrade my IBM ThinkPad R32 and looked out on the net for the best Hard Drive and best transfer process. The Apricorn was pretty much the product everyone suggested so I went with it.

My only regret is that I don't have more hard drives to upgrade!

* * * Caution: Spoiler * * *
If you want to have problems and never get your transfer completed, don't read below this line. The trick is *read the manual first* then follow the manual step by step through the process. The result will be a cloned drive in an amazingly short period of time. I stress the manual because my USB 1.1 did not have enough power to drive the enclosure by itself and the manual references that you might need the second USB cable as a power source. The software quickly told me it couldn't find the clone drive so I added the cable and viola! off it went.

My transfer from a 30GB 4200RPM OEM drive to a Western Digital 80GB 5400GB 8MB cache drive was 1 hour covers to covers and even included me checking everything I could think of because I didn't believe it could be this fast.

BONUS! The CDROM contains a program that is not referenced in the online product information BUT, guess where it's mentioned? Yep, right there in the manual. There is a drive image backup capability that is a neat way to ferret away a couple of disk images from time to time.

Pros Compatible with notebooks as far back as 1999

Cons None that I can think of

Summary I replaced my Compaq Progisnia 161's 4GB HD with a 100GB drive in a few hours. I didn't think it would work, especially after speaking to tech support prior to starting the transfer. But he was wrong. It worked. I've upgraded and intstalled hard drive's in normal pc's countless times and thought that the laptop's BIOS would have a fit. I was wrong. The laptop recognized the drive size and everything worked out smoothly. I am glad I purchased this product. Best thing is, I can use it again to upgrade friend's/family's laptop hard drives!!! It's a 10 because I find no fault with it, it's easy, can be reused again, and serves as an external hd enclosure for portability.