Upgrade your notebook computer's hard drive By Jay Dougherty


dpa German Press Agency
Published: Saturday December 23, 2006

By Jay Dougherty, Washington- Sooner or later, you're going to fill up the space on your notebook computer's hard drive. With today's beefy applications along with your downloaded files, music, video, and digital photos, it's really just a matter of time before you'll be wondering how to cope with the data. You could delete files or move them to DVDs, but when those aren't acceptable options, the only remaining alternative is to upgrade your hard drive.

The good news is that it's not terribly difficult to upgrade a notebook computer's hard drive these days. A little know-how and a small screwdriver are the only prerequisites.

-- Buy a replacement hard drive

Notebook hard drives are readily available today. Just go to a computer parts site such as Newegg.com (http://www.newegg.com), type "notebook hard drive" into the search field, and you'll get plenty of results.

Most notebook hard drives are of the 2.5 inch variety and use the IDE or ATA-6 standard for connectivity. These work interchangeably. Some newer models use Serial ATA connections, however, so be sure you know which type your notebook has before purchasing. You can find out from your notebook manufacturer's website - or through a phone call, perhaps even to a local computer store that sells the model you have.

Then you'll need to decide how much data your new hard drive should be able to hold. Plan on doubling your notebook's hard drive capacity to make the upgrade worth your while. Notebooks older than six months or so often have 30 or 40 gigabyte (GB) hard drives, and today you can easily find 60 or 80 GB hard drives for around 70 dollars - even 100 GB drives are available for a bit more.

The other factor you should consider is the rotational speed of the drive. Here, you'll have two options: 5,400 revolution per minute (rpm) drives and 72,000 rpm drives. Choose the latter - they're generally not more expensive and will provide a noticeable speed boost for you in booting and using your notebook.

-- Buy an external enclosure

With a new notebook hard drive and an external notebook hard drive enclosure, you can create an exact duplicate of your existing hard drive. Once the duplicate is created, you merely replace your existing hard drive with the duplicate new, larger hard drive, and you're ready to go.

External notebook hard drive enclosures are the key component here, however. These enclosures make it easy for you to attach the new hard drive to your computer via a USB port. Once attached, you can create a clone of your current hard drive with ease.

An external enclosure for a notebook hard drive is inexpensive, too - it should cost from 12 to 25 dollars at a reputable online vendor such as Newegg. Just search for "external hard drive enclosure 2.5," and choose one of the products available.

Once your upgrade is complete, you'll probably want to keep the external enclosure in service by using it to house your original hard drive to make backups or to have a handy portable storage device for transporting lots of data.

-- Clone your hard drive

You'll also need imaging software with a "clone" feature to create an exact duplicate of your current hard drive. Cloning differs from traditional backup in that a clone is a bit-for-bit replication of everything on your hard drive. No data is stored in a proprietary format, as typically happens with conventional backup software.

Today, the two leading imaging packages with a cloning option are Acronis' TrueImage (http://www.acronis.com) and Symantec's Norton Ghost (http://www.symantec.com). Both products making cloning your drive a one-click affair - once the drive is connected to your notebook with an external external enclosure.

You could also go the freeware route and try XXClone (http://www.xxclone.com), a capable, no-frills disk cloning utility.

Depending upon the amount of data on your original hard drive, the cloning process could take anywhere from a half hour to a few hours.

-- Install the new hard drive

When the cloning procedure is complete, you're ready to finalise the upgrade by installing the new, larger, cloned hard drive into your notebook.

Directions for removing your notebook's hard drive can typically be found on the notebook maker's website. Most notebook computers are designed to allow easy hard drive upgrades. Typically, you turn you notebook over, remove a couple of small screws from the underside, which releases the tray that holds the hard drive. Pull the hard drive out, unscrew it from its tray, and then reverse the procedure to install the new hard drive.

The web site CMS (http://www.cmsproducts.com/notebook_drive_removal.htm) provides hard drive removal instructions for a plethora of notebook computers.

Instructions for many models come complete with pictures so that you know exactly what to expect. With the new hard drive installed, just start up your notebook as usual, and everything should work as before - with the exception that you'll now have much more free space to work with.

© 2006 dpa German Press Agency