Hi.

I recently took apart my laptop because it got wet, and I thought I'd give it a good dry with the trusty hair dryer. In the process of taking it apart I discovered how awesome Sony are; they placed the HDD in a very easy to access place, so you only need to unscrew four screws, and then you can slide the thing out. Now, on to the problem at hand. I'm running out of space on my 320GB HDD. I'm looking at a 500GB one, unless a 7200rpm variant of the 1TB 2.5" HDDs exist. I haven't managed to find one, but if someone can point me to one I'd be delighted. So, my question is, how do I go about copying everything from my current HDD to the new one, OS, partitions and all. Is this do-able?? This is because I don't want to buy Windows 7 again, and have to deal with installing Oblivion and Morrowind etc. again. Any tips??

Many thanks .

EDIT: Also, would it be worth considering the 1TB 5400rpm HDD, or would the slower speed of it ruin my gaming experience??

http://clonezilla.org/. You'll have to have them both plugged in at the same time to have it clone from drive to drive directly (old drive-new drive). Otherwise you'll need an intermediary drive to store the image from the first one, then restore the image to the new one (old drive-image stored on intermediary drive-new drive). This second option can also be done with http://redobackup.org/ (it can't do drive to drive cloning or dynamically resizing partitions)

One thing to note: If you are jumping from a 5400 RPM to a 7200 RPM drive, you may notice a decrease in your battery life. If you are already using a 7200 RPM drive, ignore this note.

How would I be able to have them both plugged in?? Is there a way to plug both into the laptop at the same time?? I don't have a desktop with slots for 2.5" drives available, but I do have an external HDD somewhere. Also, using 7200rpm at the moment, so would I notice a massive drop in performance whilst playing games if I switched to the 5400rpm??

I used a 7200 rpm in my last laptop (we have 3 laptops now, along with 2 desktops) and 2 things stood out that I didn't like:

1) Hard drive was prone to overheating and causing blue screen. They don't get all that much space for cooling.

2) Battery life dropped significantly over a standard 5400 rpm drive.

Using a 5400 rpm drive and playing Oblivion, Morrowind, and other games, I noticed no difference at all except perhaps in boot time. Now if you were perhaps doing video editing or anything that creates a large amount of movement in hard disk storage, spindle speed would be very noticeable in difference here.

If you play Oblivion with a lot of mods, especially hi res texture packs, then the hard drive speed makes a huge difference on the load times and some impact on frame rate (for hi res textures only).

i don't know exactly how much shorter the load times would be with 7200rpm vs 5400rpm, but if you compare SSD to traditional HDD, you are looking at incredibly long load times vs. very short load times.

I use a lot of mods, but all Vanilla res textures for Ob. (I use CorePCs Vibrant ones). For Morrowind the textures are whatever is in the Morrowind Visual Overhaul thing, which I can't remember, I'm not too bothered about load times, mainly FPS. SSDs are insanely expensive for the size I need, so unfortunately they are out of the question. I'd be willing to put up with less battery life for better gaming (I only really play when plugged in anyway). I've never noticed any overheating of my HDD with this laptop, so I don't think that'll be a problem if I go for the 500GB 7200rpm HDD. Decisions decisions

EDIT: @ThirdEye, was the boot time much longer?? And did you run Vanilla Ob and Morrowind??

Rang up my local IT store and they do a 750GB and 1TB 7200rpm HDD . The 1TB is out of stock, and is more than what I want to spend anyway. Thanks for all the help!

They seem to be around $180 - 200 at Newegg
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=40000380%20600003340&IsNodeId=1&Description=1tb%202.5&name=7200%20RPM&Order=BESTMATCH