[JMan09]

I was interested in upgrading my internal hard drive and remember seeing someone get an external and open it up and put that hard drive in the laptop and their old internal into the external case. Well I want to know, how easy or difficult is it to open the case on the Western Digital portable hard drive? And also, is Western Digital a good hard drive to go with? feel free to recommend another way to do this.

[cjrivera]

(bump)

... because I was going to ask the same question.

something like this
CompUSA.com - Seagate Free Agent Go 160GB Hard Drive - ST901603FGA1E1 - Computer Upgrades � Hard Drives
or this...
CompUSA.com - Maxtor OneTouch III Mini Edition 160GB Hard Drive - R01E160 - Computer Upgrades � Hard Drives

[CharlesS]

As always, I recommend you get an external enclosure instead of a pre-built external hard drive. Not only can you get a better quality enclosure this way, but external enclosures are designed to be easy to open up and swap the drive out of, whereas pre-built external drives aren't and, in my experience, can be a complete pain to open up.

[cjrivera]

Thanks CharlesS.

[mduell]

It's difficult to know (before cracking the external open) if the drive inside the external is ATA or SATA.

I'd just buy an internal drive (usually with a better warranty than an external anyway) and a separate enclosure. Newegg carries both with good prices and service.

[JMan09]

thanks for the help, I'll go with the internal and buy a case to put my current internal in.
would this one work in my macbook?Newegg.com - Western Digital Scorpio WD1600BEVS 160GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache Serial ATA150 Notebook Hard Drive - OEM

[JMan09]

Also what type of enclosure would I need to get for it?

[CharlesS]

One thing you might want to think about is the fact that Seagate drives have a 5-year warranty, whereas that Western Digital probably doesn't.

As for the enclosure, it depends - what type of connectors are you looking for? USB 2.0? FireWire? FireWire 800? eSATA? If USB 2.0 or eSATA, pretty much anything will work, but if you're going FireWire, you should look for an enclosure that uses the Oxford chipset (they tend to be a bit more expensive, of course). Other than that, you'll want to get a 2.5" enclosure to fit your 2.5" drive, and you'll want to make sure that you get an enclosure that takes a Serial ATA drive, since that is the type of hard drive used in your MacBook, and not regular parallel ATA.