Apricorn Drivewire Universal HDD Adapter USB To 2.5IN & 3.5IN Sata & Pata
by APRICORN MASS STORAGE
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List Price: Our Price: $29.99 You Save: $8.00 (21%) Availability: Usually ships in 3-4 business days Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Apricorn Drivewire Universal HDD Adapter USB To 2.5IN & 3.5IN Sata & Pata
Customer Review: Looks good to me
Summary: 5 Stars
I have not used this yet as it just came in the mail but it looks good to me. I had never heard of a Drivewire before I read about it in a customer's comment so before I purchased it I looked it up on the Apricorn website because the picture and the explanation on amazon were not very enlightening. Maybe for techies it is easy to understand exactly what the different products are that are written up in this mysterious code used for such things but for us nontechies it makes no sense at all. Especially when trying to decide which product to buy. Fortunately, Apricorn explains it very clearly. It is a little box that you plug your new harddrive into in order to copy your old harddrive onto the new one.
I found out about this when I was researching netbooks and trying to figure out the cheapest way to install software and a bigger harddrive. You can buy a 500gb laptop harddrive for about $100 on amazon (a 750gb desktop harddrive costs even less) but unless you have an OS install CD, it is going to cost you as you would have to buy the OS install CD, too. I already have all the software I need on my laptop and did not want to have to buy an OS install CD or an optical drive which I would rarely use. Enter the Drivewire. The fact that it fits all harddrives made it particularly attractive and with the $10 rebate offer, it was $27.99 only.
Customer Review: I love this little machine!
Summary: 4 Stars
I needed to replace my old 80GB hard drive on my computer. I tried for days to get the operating system and all of my files or an ISO image onto my new 500GB hard drive but was unable to do so. While searching for another product online I saw the Apricorn Drivewire and after some serious research I decided to make the purchase. I am so pleased with my decision. It was easy to set up and easy to use. Everything was moved over to my new 500GB hardrive. When I checked my hard drive in BIOS / Setup it showed 500GB but in Windows XP it showed 80GB. I found out that the Dell Restore partition had taken up about 380GB of space. I ended up needing to purchase Acronis Disk Director V11 Home to merge the unallocated space from the Dell Restore partition with Drive C. I do not know if this is an issue with Apricorn, Windows XP, or Dell so I will not blame Apricorn. I will say that I took away a star because they do not include partition managing software (especially if they are aware of this issue). It would come in handy for issues like mine. All in all, it is a great product which makes upgrading your hard drive simple. I would recommend it to anyone who wishes to move info from one hard drive to another, or back up files.Customer Review: Nice adapter, poor software
Summary: 2 Stars
I purchased this product to assist in upgrading a 60GB hard drive in an older laptop running Windows XP Professional SP3 to a new 120GB Western Digital drive. Connecting the new drive to the adapter was straight-forward, and the included EZ Gig III drive cloning software was fairly easy to use. However, once I installed the new drive into the laptop, it would work fine for a period of several hours to several days, but then fail to boot. As I discovered later, defragmenting the new drive would cause it to fail to boot immediately. I repeated the cloning process at least a dozen times with both default and various custom settings in EZ GIg III, with the same results. This wasted about a week's worth of my free time, since I had to go back to using my old drive and restore files from backup every time the laptop would fail to boot with the new drive. I contacted Apricorn technical support, and they suggested that I set the size of the new drive to something below 100GB, which in my opinion would defeat the purpose of the exercise. I am aware of the 137GB drive size limit in older laptops, but I think that telling customers to set it below 100GB is unreasonable. I was finally able to successfully clone the drive using the free Acronis True Image software available from Western Digital. Caveat emptor!Customer Review: USELESS DEVICE WITH RANDOM DISCONNECTS
Summary: 1 Stars
I really wanted this Apricorn Adapter to work, what could be nicer than having SATA and PATA choices at any given time. But as soon as I hooked my SATA drive to my USB on the back of the computer and I tried to do a Back-Up the drive started disconnecting in the middle of the Back-Up. The thing is, I wasn't watching this process all the time so I fear some of the data may have been corrupted. To make matters worse, I can not play Movies from the same external drive, the disk gets ejected constantly in the middle of playback, basically, the Apricorn adapter is useless. It is too late for me to get my money back but maybe I can save someone else from making the same mistake I did.
(Before someone from Apricorn comes here to blame me for not knowing how to use the device properly, I want everyone to know I am computer savvy and I followed their instruction faithfully. Even if some people have had no problems it does not mean their device works all the time. If you do a search on the Internet for this device you will find others with similar stories. I think it is possible they manufactured a bunch of defective units and dumped them in the market rather than recall them. They should have an official recall advertised on their website.)
Customer Review: Kudos to Apricorn for Another Great Product!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Let me start by saying I have been using Apricorn products since 2004. I started with the EZ Upgrade HDD kit. This consisted of an enclosure for a 2.5 IDE laptop drive and EZ GIG II software.
I had used this product for years and recently have had a need to clone a 2.5 Sata laptop drive so I immediatley looked for an Apricorn product.
Yesterday I received my new HDD and the Drivewire kit. I hooked up the new drive and connections to the drivewire adapter. I booted my pc from the EZ Gig III boot cd.
The old drive was a 5400rpm 160gb drive. The new one was a 7200rpm 500gb Hybrid drive. OS is Windows 7 x64. I selected "NOT" to allow EZ Gig III to extend the partitions on the new drive. This made an identical copy of everything with no errors in 1hr. When I was done swapped the new drive with the old one. Booted windows 7 and waited. It detected the new drive and made me restart the computer. After the reboot I went into Windows 7 x64 and used the Disk Management built into windows to extend the partition. Windows did this in a few seconds with no issues.
In my book Apricorn has made another product and is a must have for techies.
Kudos Apricorn!