How To Upgrade Your Laptop Hard Drive

These days, a lot of laptops come with pretty big hard drives, all things considered. It's not hard to find 320GB or 500GB drives in even the relatively affordable models. That wasn't always the case, though. If your laptop is a year or two old, you might find yourself running out of space.

Or perhaps, you just feel that your drive access is too slow. Your drive may be large enough, but it's an older 4500 RPM or 5400 RPM model and you want to move up to a newer 7200 RPM drive, perhaps with more cache.

The good news is, unlike many parts on modern notebooks, the hard drive is usually something you can swap out. The bad news is, it takes a little bit of work. In this article we'll show you how to copy the contents of your notebook's drive to a new one, then install it.

We'll be using a Dell XPS M1330 (Buy Now) here, along with a brand-new 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200.4 drive (Buy Now). But our advice will be as generic as possible, so you can easily apply it to your own system. Continued...

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