Upgrade and clone hard drive in laptop

I recently bought an upgraded hard drive to put into my laptop.

Side note: Momentus XT 500 GB "hybrid" hard drive. This is a 7200 RPM drive with 4GB of solid-state disk internal to act as a write-through cache. It's supposed to drastically speed up the performance of the drive for executing common things (like booting, swapping, running apps).

Goal: clone current hard drive, swap, then boot.

Approach 1: purchase Apricorn EZ Gig product that comes with a cable and a software package to clone the drive. Price: $39. Unfortunately, they were out of stock locally, so I attempted the poor-man's approach.

Approach 2: Use an adapter kit I had laying around to hook up the drive to USB, then use CloneZilla to do it.

1. Visit http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php and download clonezilla ISO. (I got the AMD64 arch for my E5500 laptop)
2. Visit http://tuxboot.org/download.php so I can burn the ISO to a USB stick.
1. Follow to source forge, go into the latest date directory, and download the tuxboot-windows.exe version.
3. Run tuxboot.exe (it wants admin access to write to the device)
4. Burn the image to the USB device. Don't worry about rebooting since you won't be booting to this machine immediately.
5. Reboot onto the USB stick
6. Follow prompts to start up clonezilla
7. Choose drive-to-drive clone
8. Follow prompts, pick the right drives for source and destination
9. Let it churn. My machine was doing approximately 2-3 GB/min, so it took a few hours.

When it finished, I simply swapped the drives and the system magically booted up. Easy, peazy, lemon squeezy.

Upgrade to Momentus XT hybrid drive

I just upgraded my old Hitachi 5400 RPM 250 GB laptop drive to a Seagate Momentus XT 7200 RPM 500GB "Hybrid" drive. It's got 4GB of build in SSD solid-state NAND gate flash memory that acts as a smart cache with what they call "Adaptive Memory Technology." Supposedly it figures out the files you use the most and drops them on the SSD portion of the disk to speed things up.

First step was to hook up the drive with a SATA-to-USB adapter and connect it to my drive. The I used Clonezilla to clone drive-to-drive and it reproduced my 170 GB partition from the old drive onto the new one as a bit-by-bit copy. Then, simply switch the drives in the PC and everything magically works just like it did before. Easy as pie. (I don't know why people say this. Have you ever baked a pie? It's a PITA.)

It certainly SEEMS faster, even after a few minutes of using it. Rebooting my 64-bit windows 7 laptop is very quick. It boots in less than 30 seconds now to the login screen. It used to be over 40 sec. I ran a benchmark utility (Passmark Performance Test) and it claimed the new drive was 2-4x faster for sequential read-write performance. I'm sold.

I read some reviews and they were generally positive with a people complaining that the drive didn't spin down very often, it was noisy, or it vibrated a lot. I'm not sure, but I think it's a little louder. Considering my laptop sits on a desk and not my lap most of the time, I don't care much.

One suggestion I found was to upgrade from SD23 firmware so SD24. So I went to the page and did it. (http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=215451). The problem is, it got stuck when I downloaded and ran the upgrade.

When I booted the machine, it would give me "Invalid System Disk. Press any key..." After that, it would boot into Windows 7 fine. Rebooting many times and re-running the utility did nothing.

Eventually I figured it out. I hit "F12" during start up to get boot options. Then I simply selected "Boot from internal HDD" and it magically fired up the upgrade utility for the firmware. 30 seconds later, it finished, shut down, restarted and now it works fine. Problem solved.

A little wonky, but it worked. Dunno if it made the drive any better. Time will tell.