The Whole Drive Guide

Advice for the gigabyte-addicted: How to upgrade to today's best and biggest--or keep your current hard disks running smoothly.

Notebook Gigs: Beef Up Your Notebook Storage

On many laptops, replacing the 2.5-inch drive involves nothing more than unscrewing a panel, sliding the old drive out, and popping the new one in. Of course, you also need to transfer the data from your old drive--and that can be a challenge because most notebooks have space for only a single hard drive.

Vendors such as Apricorn, CMS, and SimpleTech offer upgrade kits for a multitude of notebooks. In addition to containing a drive, the kits may come with mounting hardware, and in some cases they may carry both data transfer software and hardware for temporarily attaching a second drive. Apricorn, for example, provides a drive cable that connects to your notebook via a PC Card, plus an external caddy that holds the new drive while your files are copied to it. The company will also offer a USB kit soon. After the upgrade, you can use the caddy kit with your old drive for additional storage. Using a $369, 60GB, 4200-rpm Apricorn kit, we were able to upgrade a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6000 notebook quickly and easily.

Do It Yourself

You can save a tidy sum by assembling your own kit. At the time of this writing, some retailers listed a bare 60GB, 4200-rpm MK6021GAS drive from Toshiba for about $200. Instead of using a kit's custom file-copy software, you can create an image of the old drive with a program like PowerQuest's Drive Image, Acronis's TrueImage (read about both of them at " Copy, Back Up Your PC's Drive With Ease"), or Symantec's Norton Ghost (though our reviewer found the 2003 version problematic). Depending on the size of the image file, you can store it on various media, including CDs, DVDs, or an external hard drive like Maxtor's Personal Storage 5000DV (See " Storage: Maxtor's OneTouch Backup Hard Drive"). Or in place of the Apricorn caddy, you can build one using a FireWire or USB 2.0 drive enclosure such as ADS Technologies' Pyro 2.5 Drive Kit.

Other Options

If you need only a few extra gigabytes, you can slip in a PC Card drive such as Toshiba's 5GB MK5002MPL, which sells for about $250 as a bare drive from Toshiba or for $290 in a kit from SimpleTech. Apricorn and SimpleTech also sell drives that slip into the multipurpose bays of many popular notebooks. We found a $549, 60GB SimpleTech model for our Dell Latitude C640.