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.