Poway, Calif. August 2, 2004 - Apricorn, a leader in personal storage products, today released the EZ Upgrade 1.8T Hard Drive Upgrade Kit. EZ Upgrade 1.8T is the first hard drive upgrade kit designed specifically for 1.8" hard drives found in many of the latest portable notebooks and tablet PC's. In three simple steps users can seamlessly transfer all the data from the old hard drive to a new hard drive and transform the old hard drive into a portable Hi-Speed USB 2.0 backup and/or storage solution.

The EZ 1.8T Upgrade process begins by sliding the new hard drive into the EZ Upgrade 1.8T enclosure and connecting to the device's USB port. Next, the machine is booted from the EZ Gig II Hard Drive Upgrade & Backup Software, which begins the drive-cloning process. Finally, remove the old drive and install the new hard drive into the device.

"EZ Upgrade 1.8T Hard Drive Upgrade Kit is Apricorn's latest innovation in our family of award winning hard drive upgrade kits," said Mike McCandless, Apricorn VP of Sales & Marketing. "Users now have an easy to use solution to upgrade notebooks and tablet PC's based on 1.8" hard drives to the new, high capacity hard drives available today."

EZ Upgrade 1.8T Hard Drive Upgrade Kit is FCC and CE certified and is sold as a stand alone upgrade kit, or with a 20 GB hard drive or a 40 GB hard drive included. EZ Upgrade 1.8T has a data transfer rate up to 480 Mbps, is Plug-n-Play compatible, hot swappable and powered by the USB port. EZ Upgrade 1.8T ships with a Hi-Speed USB 2.0 (USB 1.1 compatible) enclosure, USB cable, auxiliary power cable and Apricorn's EZ Gig II Hard Drive Upgrade & Backup Software.

EZ Gig II Hard Drive Upgrade & Backup Software, for Windows, is one of the most powerful and user-friendly backup packages available, providing two utilities on one disk: Clone EZ and Image EZ.

Clone EZ is ideal for users who require an exact bootable clone of their drive. A cloned copy is ideal for upgrading a hard drive or real-time disaster recovery. Image EZ creates a compressed image of an entire hard drive, or an individual partition of a hard drive. At its maximum setting, Image EZ can compress data to less than half its original size, allowing backups to be made to a smaller hard drive, or multiple backups to a large hard drive. Image EZ provides password protection for backup images and a comments field so each image can be labeled and easily identified. Image EZ also has a File Editor that allows editing or restoration of individual ?les or folders.

System Requirements
PC-compatible computer with Pentium CPU or similar, 32 MB RAM, CD Rom, CD-RW, or Floppy drive, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Availability and Pricing
The new EZ Upgrade 1.8T Hard Drive Upgrade Kit will be available August 2004 in the US, Canada and online at www.apricorn.com .

MSRP starts at $69 for the Upgrade Kit, $269 for the 20 GB version and $319 for the 40 GB version.

About Apricorn
Apricorn provides innovative, easy-to-use data storage, backup & upgrade products that enable mobile professionals to maximize their notebook and desktop system performance. During the company's 20-year history, Apricorn has brought to market over 500 memory and storage expansion products, establishing a strong reputation as a top provider of portable computing peripherals and memory modules. Apricorn is headquartered in Poway, California.

For additional information about Apricorn products please visit www.apricorn.com .

Source : Tom's Hardware US