New hard drive - 500 GB of goodness

Few days ago, I picked up a new hard drive for my laptop. It is a Seagate 500 GB 7200.4 with G-force protection, meaning that if I drop my laptop, the hard drive head should detect the fall and prevent damage to my data. I don't intend to test this functionality but it is a nice form of protection to have. It only cost me $5 more to get a hard drive with G-force protection, and I believe that the price difference is worth it.

I was concerned that I would have to reinstall Windows and all my applications when I made the switch to the new hard drive. After reading up on the subject of upgrading hard drives, I learned that I can copy data from the old hard drive to the new one, and simply switch out the drive, without any need for software reinstall.

I first tried using seeral freeware programs to copy my old drive to the new one - DriveImageXL and similar programs were supposed to perform the task easily. Unfortunately, my Windows 7 installation had created a tiny 100 MB partition at the beginning of the hard drive, so the freeware programs could not copy the hard drive accurately (or maybe they would but I could not try them all). One online article recommended a trial version of Acronis True Image for hard drive copying. The trial version gives you 15 days to use the software for free. All I needed was one day. :-) Acronis did an amazing job of copying data and partitions from one drive to the other. I highly recommend it!

When I bought my new hard drive, I also bough an external USB enclosure for a 2.5" drive. I put my new drive in the USB enclosure, plugged it into my laptop, ran Acronis, and less than an hour later my hard drive was copied. Then, I replaced the hard drive in my laptop with the new one, booted up the computer and everything was just the way it was before. Easy!

In the past, I had always avoided upgrading hard drives, but now that I know how easy it is, I would highly recommend it.