Upgrade Notebook Storage On The Quick

With the proliferation of audio, digital images and video files, notebook computer hard drives are quickly driven to their full capacity. And with upgrading and installing a new hard drive often requiring a lot of time and effort, cloning is the way to go.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' Travelstar 2.5-inch Internal Hard Drive 2-in-1 Notebook PC Upgrade Kit offers quick upgrades while also providing a portable storage device that contains a backup copy of the data.

PRODUCT: Travelstar Upgrade Kit PRICE: $209.99 for SATA, $199.99 for PATA WARRANTY: 3 years DISTRIBUTORS: CDW, Ingram Micro, Synnex COMPANY: Hitachi Global Storage Technologies San Jose, Calif. (800) 801-4618 www.hitachigst.com

Hitachi's Travelstar Upgrade Kit contains a new hard drive and all the tools necessary to copy the old drive. The only caveat is that the current drive must be functioning properly; the kit will not work with a dead hard drive. It arrives with Apricorn EZ Gig II Hard Drive Cloning and Upgrade software, a one-meter USB interface cable and an auxiliary power cable required for systems with USB 1.1 ports. The kit also includes a pocket-size drive enclosure to convert the old hard drive into a portable USB unit.

The kits are available in 40-, 60-, 80-, 100-, 120- and 160-Gbyte capacities. The Test Center reviewed Hitachi's 160-Gbyte kit, which comes with the Travelstar 5K160 hard drive, a drive that uses Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) technology to pack in more data. Although notebooks in need of hard drive upgrades most likely will contain a PATA drive, Hitachi offers the upgrade kit for either a PATA or SATA drive. The 160-Gbyte PATA kit costs $199.99; the SATA version costs $209.99.

Once the old drive has been cloned, the new drive is ready for installation. The old drive is then installed in the USB enclosure. Use of the upgrade kit requires a notebook PC with a Pentium CPU or similar, 32 Mbytes of RAM, a CD-ROM drive, USB 1.1 or 2.0 and Windows 98SE, ME, 2000 or XP.