Friday, July 10, 2009

Upgrade Complete

The hard disk and enclosure which I ordered on Wednsday for my laptop from NewEgg arrive yesterday.  (NewEgg has a warehouse in NJ so when I order from them I frequently get my stuff the next day, even when I select UPS Ground shipping.)

Rather than installing Leopard on the new disk then importing all my apps and data, or doing a restore from Time Machine, I cloned the original disk using SuperDuper.  It worked fine and the machine now has plenty of free drive space.  Cloning the original disk over a FireWire 400 connection took about 2 hours, then it took me another hour or so to take apart and reassemble the machine.

One of the things I noticed immediately about the Western Digital disk is how quiet it is.  The original drive, a Hitachi, wasn't loud, but it was audible.  The new disk is virtually silent.  It's also a bit faster than the Hitachi, but it remains to be seen if or how it'll affect battery life.

This morning I took advantage of my now-mostly empty disk by upgrading VirtualBox to v3.0.0, and creating VMs with Solaris 10 and XP Pro SP3.   Even with my Win7RC VM, I still have about 358 GB free.

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