I bought this one, it came about a week ago:
http://www.costcentral.com/proddetai...0823AS/M56922/
Swapping them out is indeed as easy as removing two small screws from the bottom of the laptop, sliding out the caddy (it's a little tough to slide out, don't be afraid to push it out pretty hard), unscrewing two more small screws from the caddy, and then swapping the hard drives and doing the reverse.
To transfer files, I recommend using a desktop computer with 2 SATA ports. I booted them up as slave drives to my desktop hard drive and then ran Windows' Disk Management tool to create a 160gb NTFS partition on the new drive. Then I shut down and booted up the Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows (
www.ubcd4win.com, you need to make the CD image by using a Windows XP disc so there is some setup involved but the disc is great after it's burned). UBCD4Win has a program, I believe it's called Drive Image XML or something like that, which directly copied the old 100gb partition into the new 160gb partition. Then I thought I was done, so I removed the two laptop drives from my desktop and put the new 160gb one into my laptop.
Then Vista didn't like being moved, and it would not boot from the drive but I knew my data was in there. I loaded the Vista CD which could not repair startup, so I went into the recovery console. I followed some tips from Microsoft's knowledge base (
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392/en-us) and ran these commands:
bcdedit /FixMbr
bcdedit /FixBoot
and the list of six commands under the "bootrec.exe options" part of the page.
Then, Vista booted up! I was so glad. Nothing had changed, other than I gained my extra space that I paid for. In fact, Vista didn't even show any signs that it had moved; it didn't complain about new hardware, genuine advantage didn't remove my key - nothing. It's great!
And then I reformatted the old drive and installed Ubuntu on it. I'm still playing around with Ubuntu but Windows Vista is my main operating system, and will continue to be for a long time.
Oh and in the Vista score number thing, the rating of my old drive (for speed) was 5.1; the new drive is 5.2. So it's a tiny bit faster... But from 5400rpm to 7200rpm is quite a speed upgrade, and you will notice the difference. Loading time for programs (and boot time for Windows) is bottlenecked by the hard drive, and it will certainly help to get a faster hard drive.
One more thing - this 160gb drive is MUCH quieter than the stock 100gb 7200rpm drive. I hardly hear it, it's great! And I know it's safe because it has the cool feature where it detects a fall and in mid-air stores the hard drive arm off to the side where it will not scratch the disk upon impact. So cool! AND, it features perpendicular recording which is supposedly more reliable.
I say go for it! If you didn't understand my transfer process, I recommend just backing up the old-fashioned way (burn documents to a CD or DVD) and install onto the new drive.
~Ricky
