Laptop Hard Drive Upgrade
July 3, 2008 11:26 pmI recently upgraded my laptop hard drive from 80 GB to 160 GB. You may be in a similar situation to me where your laptop is a little older and the drive is running out of space so you bought a 2.5″ external hard drive to help out. What I found was that the extra space is nice but I actually didn’t need the entire 160 GB to be portable. So, I decided to swap the drives (80 GB is still pretty good to take with you).
The procedure was quite simple:
- Clear the mobile hard drive of content
- Clone the drive
- Swap the drives
Of course, the devil is in the details. Removing content from the mobile drive is quite simple. Cloning the drive was also pretty simple. To do this I used Acronis Migrate Easy for Windows XP. It is not free, but a free trial is available so if this is a one time clone then the trial will work fine since it has full functionality. The software worked great, the only limitation was since I was cloning to a larger drive the resizing and repartitioning options were a not as flexible as I would have liked. That deficiency could probably be fixed after the fact using partitioning software (e.g. Partition Magic etc.). In the end, it cost me about 40 MB of space which is not a big issue and not worth trying to fix.
Swapping the drives can be the tricky part. My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1300 and removing the hard drive was straight forward. The external drive was a Lacie 2.5″ Mobile Hard Drive.
The external drive can be a wild card since each one is different and it can be hard to tell how to open the case. Luckily with the Lacie there are 4 screws on each side (these can be seen in the large image). When all 8 screws are removed the top and bottom of the drive separate giving good access to the actual hard drive. From there it is just a matter of unscrewing the drive, placing the new drive in the dell chassis and replacing the chassis in the bottom of the laptop. Then boot up and hopefully everything goes fine. If there are issues, then replace the original hard drive.
A good overview of the process can be found here.
One Response to “Laptop Hard Drive Upgrade”
I recently replaced the built-in hard drive in my Macbook (why the surprised look?
Anyway, it came originally with a 120GB drive which was too small, and too slow. So, I picked up a Seagate Momentus 320GB 7200RPM 16MB cache. That hard drive makes the machine feel like a honkin’ desktop! Plus, it gave me adequate space to dedicate 80GB for a Windows Vista partition 
Care to comment?