Upgrading the Hard Disk in Rohan

This afternoon I bit the bullet and ordered a new hard disk for Rohan, the MacBook Pro which I bought in January 2007.

Rohan came with a 120 GB hard disk and I'm currently down to about 10.5 GB free space.  This leaves me little room to experiment with virtual machines, plus as I take more high resolution pictures with the Nikon S560 I bought back in May, that space is dwindling.

So, I went to the online geek toy Mecca, AKA NewEgg, and ordered a Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT 500 GB disk, which should last me until Rohan eventually gets replaced in a couple of years.  I also ordered a MacAlly external FireWire/USB enclosure for the old disk.

There are a few ways I can do the disk swap and get my system back:

1. Make a backup in Time Machine, swap the disks, then do a restore.
2. Install the new disk in the enclosure, clone it using SuperDuper!, then swap them.
3. Install the new disk in Rohan, install the old disk in the enclosure, then with the enclosure connected to Rohan, install Leopard on the new drive and use OS X's Migration Assistant to import all my apps, data, and settings from the old disk.

When I upgraded the drive in my old G4 iBook I used option #2.  When I upgraded the drive in my parents' MacBook, I did #3.   I'm leaning towards using SuperDuper!, since it avoids the whole backup and restore thing, and it worked fine the first time I used it.  Doing so should result in a perfect clone of my existing system, but with more disk space.

To do the physical swap, I will follow the excellent instructions available from iFixit.