Upgrade Notebook Storage On The Quick

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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.

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.