Review on 💾 Corsair SSD and HDD Cloning Kit - CSSD-UPGRADEKIT - 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive and Hard Disk Drive by Joseph Winfrey

The product worked as expected with no issues. Background. My Lenovo laptop was having startup issues that caused Windows to get stuck on the start screen. First I turned off the power, then I turned it back on and the problem went away. Then after a while the problem got worse and worse until one day I had to shut down the computer about 5 times before it would boot to the Windows desktop. I've come to the conclusion that the problem is that the hard drive is the main culprit. I decided to upgrade from a traditional 500GB drive (originally in a laptop) to a 256GB SSD. The biggest problem I had was disk cloning. I knew I used a program called Ghost that could do this a long time ago, but after searching the web I found that there are now many other programs that do the same thing. My laptop is running Windows 8 and I reformatted the hard drive and restored it using the recovery partition that comes with every Lenovo product (basically I wanted to clone the factory hard drive). This product - I ended up with Corsair because I've used a lot of their products. After booting the CD, I discovered that the program (labeled Corsair on the CD) was actually just Apricorn's EZ GIG IV. I think Apricorn actually gives away their program for free on their website, so the cost of the product was basically the box and cable. So I connected the SSD with the cable and the cable to the USB port of my laptop. Let Windows finish "installing" the new device, and then I put the CD in and ran the program. Again, this is Apricorn's EZ GIG IV and I used the version that was on the CD. The clone wizard is fairly self-explanatory up to the point where you start cloning, and you can fine-tune some "advanced" features. You only need to go to the advanced features (if I understand correctly) if you are cloning a smaller drive to a larger one. If you don't set it up properly, your smaller drive will be cloned with exactly the same amount of space, rendering your larger drive virtually unusable, but I digress. In my case, I'm cloning from a larger disk to a smaller one, so I didn't change anything in the "advanced" settings. The cloning process took 15-20 minutes (I didn't specify it exactly). After that, I replaced the old drive with a new SSD, and voila, it booted into Windows like I hadn't changed anything at all. The entire procedure was FREE. I had more headache to open the laptop. I only gave this product 4 stars because in a way I could just buy a cable and download the EZ GIG IV Apricorn from their website and save a few bucks.