Review: Apricorn's EZ Upgrade For Notebooks

Say your laptop is still functioning, but you're running out of disk space. What should you do? An obvious answer would be to replace the old drive. Right—just pull the old drive out, and slip in a bigger drive. If only it were that simple.

As a matter of fact, it now really is that simple. I used Apricorn's EZ Upgrade Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit to change out the 60GB drive in my trusty Toshiba Satellite M35 in favor of a Seagate 160GB drive.

Since I was approaching the limits of my 60GB drive, the prospect of replacing the drive, installing Windows, reloading all the applications and data seemed like a lot of work—especially since some of my applications were downloaded, and their installer files had been deleted long ago. I shouldn't have worried. The Apricorn Upgrade Kit made it easy.

As a safety net, my first move was to make a backup of my data to my desktop computer by simply copying the folders using my network connection. Once my copies were in place I was ready to start the drive replacement process.

ComponentsI opened the Apricorn upgrade kit that included a plastic case, USB cable, and the software on CD. I also unboxed the new Seagate 160GB drive. The Apricorn enclosure supports drives up to 12.7mm in size, which was exactly what both the existing and replacement drives were. The enclosure is secured with a single screw that holds the top and bottom together. I separated the two halves and slid the Seagate drive onto the contact pins then closed the enclosure.

The Apricorn unit can be powered either by an external power supply (not included) or directly from a USB connection. The kit includes both a USB data cable and a PS2 power adapter. This arrangement allows you to power the drive from the laptop's power rather than connecting to a separate wall adapter.

I installed the Apricorn applications on my laptop and plugged the external drive into an available USB 2.0 port, then initiated Apricorn's Clone EZ software, which lead me through the process of making an almost duplicate image of the laptop's 60GB drive on the new 160GB drive. An important feature of Clone EZ is that it duplicates the existing drive, but to a larger partition. The software can automatically create a larger partition on the destination drive, so that rather than the new drive having two partitions (one containing the original drive data and another, empty partition that would need to be addressed as a different drive letter) my new drive contained my 50GB of data and about 110GB of empty space.

The transfer process was simple. I clicked some options in the software's wizard and let the system handle the details. The progress indicator on the Clone EZ software showed the copy progress, and when the process was over I initiated Windows Explorer to check the contents of the new drive.

I brought up both the existing laptop drive and the external copy in two windows and scanned through them to view the directory structure in each. Happily, they were identical so I got ready to move to the next step; swapping the old and new drives.Drive transplant

I opened the Apricorn enclosure and removed the Seagate 160GB drive that now housed a copy of my laptop's drive. I then unscrewed the cover from the laptop's 60GB drive and pulled it from its mounting, replacing it with the Seagate drive and replacing the cover.

Following Apricorn's recommendation, I put the 60GB drive in the Apricorn enclosure and closed it up. This new combination was immediately available as a backup of the laptop, and eventually as a portable USB-connected 60GB drive.

With no additional procedures remaining, I turned on the Toshiba and waited for it to boot. After the boot process, I logged in to the laptop and ran a few applications (the same ones that were on the system before I replaced the drive) including Outlook, Internet Explorer, and Photoshop. Each worked as expected, verifying that the Outlook data structure was intact, my network and Internet connections were in place, and applications and files were where I expected them to be.

Complete transformationThe entire process took less than two painless hours, with most of the time taken up by the process of copying the old drive's contents to the new one. Once my testing was done I used Apricorn's Image EZ software (also included) to make a compressed image of my drive as a backup. Image EZ allows selecting of compression ratio in order to make either quicker or smaller backups.

The Apricorn EZ Upgrade Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit sells for about $50, and the Seagate drive for less than $100. Of course you can substitute any drive you like that fits both the enclosure and your laptop.