Apricorn EZ-Upgrade Hard Drive Upgrade Kit (SATA / USB 2.0) Review

http://tiny.cc/tppewx Save 30% at Retrospect
Review: 5/5 Painless, Simple, & Just Does Everything For You. This makes migrating disk drives painless & simple. It is especially great migrating between unequally sized drives like migrating from a larger HDD to smaller SSD. And it successfully handles a bootable partition with a working operating system like Windows 7. If you bought an SSD that didn't come with a migration kit, I highly recommend this solution. Migrating is actually a complicated process. Especially when moving from larger to smaller, you have to move data to the front, then shrink the partition, then copy to new drive, make alignment changes if it is SSD, then expand to fit the new drive, and hope the operating system still works (mine didn't). I encourage you to search the web for "migrate hard drive to SSD" and you will find a number of articles and freeware offering guidance, all fairly complicated and different. I liked the SSD Freaks and lifehacker articles best. I tried a long time and ultimately failed to migrate a working Windows 7 partition. You might not realize that migrating to SSD requires different alignment, which isn't fixed by a straight copy. This Apricorn software just does it all for you, painlessly and simply. In retrospect, the only freeware alternative I think would really work, is a Windows 7 backup & restore, which should reload properly onto the new drive. But if you are like me, it takes 2-4 weeks to get all the programs reinstalled and reconfigured to the same level of productivity on my work laptop with engineering software. But with this, within hours you can simply be up on your new drive, but with everything else the same as before. But if you have a USB 3.0 port, I recommend the [[ASIN:B005C983NA Apricorn SATA Wire 3.0 Upgrade Kit ASW-USB3-25]] which should copy faster. Otherwise this one using USB 2.0, it is perfectly fine for something you rarely do, and still works with USB 3.0 ports. One thing to note is that the first time you log onto Windows 7 on the new drive, it detects and fixes something, and then reboots. Re-run your windows experience score too, which supposedly will help it re-detect it is SSD, enable optimization, and disable defrag. Product Title: Apricorn 2.5" SATA Notebook Drive Upgrade Kit