I saved a friends notebook by getting a new hard drive for it, dirt cheap fix to make a notebook last even longer, go for it.

ive had a hitatchi and it worked out great

how do you image your old drive and re-image to this new one?

These drives are very quiet, with very low power consumption. Great deal too!

#3, you need Ghost or something similar on Windows. I believe OS X has tools to do it already.

There are inexpensive hardware/software packages that allow you to hook up a new laptop drive through USB and dump the image of the internal drive which the software makes to it. Look around ebay, newegg, buy.com for products.

Also, for another $30 or so, you can get the 7200 RPM version which is somewhat faster than this one.

newegg had arconis true image for $5 some time back

Nice

Anyone know what the warranty for this drive is?

i think warranty is 3 years only.

#3, for $$ use ghost. For a free alternative, connect your source drive to a linux machine and create an image using the "dd" command. Then connect the new drive to the linux machine and use "dd" again to copy the image to the new drive.

#3 IMHO the best and easiest way to get a new drive up and running is use Acronis and they have a free 15 day trial. Image to a DVD then swap drives and restore. Or better yet purchase a USB to SATA adapter for $15 at Buy.com and you directly image to the drive and you can switch drives when the new drive is complete..

I am saving my money for the "Virtual Star" that must be coming now that they have a DeskStar amd TravelStar!

Or you can just buy an enclosure for your old 2.5" drive and move its contents to the new drive. I just bought the 320GB Western Digital 7200 deal from earlier this week, and all I needed was a free d/l from Western Digital's site to move the data easily.

next hard drive will be solid state

You may also get the 7k320 - 7200 rpm for $80 bucks AR from newegg....

#3, any Linux CD will allow you to do it. For those that don't know Linux, there are many Linux-based "GUI LiveCDs" like GParted that boot up something that looks almost exactly like Partition Magic. Linux can safely resize and move NTFS filesystems (some many times safer than some versions of NT .

BTW, this is not a good deal. It was $68 - $20 MIR = $48 just a few weeks ago at ZipZoomFly.

i would buy 500gb seagate or samsung over hitachi... i had some problems with hitachi drives in the past...

I put one of these in my macbook pro a couple weeks ago. It works great. It is silent and seems a little faster than the HD that came stock.