Prices of hard drives continue to fall. For a workstation, I just purchased a 1 terabyte, internal drive for $70. And it has a 16 mb internal buffer, which is pretty high and not very common. Thank you, Tiger Direct.
For a laptop, I just bought a 500 gb, internal drive for $85. So what’s the big deal? The disc spins at 7200 RPM, instead of the 5400 RPM speed typical of most laptop drives. Thank you, Best Buy. The only downside is that the faster drive will use up battery life a little faster.
The lesson to all this is that if you need to re-install or upgrade your operating system, there’s little need anymore to go through the routine of backing everything up, re-formatting the drive, then restoring all the data. Just pull the old hard drive out and after installing the new drive, attach the old drive as a secondary device. Copy the data back at your leisure and put the old drive on a shelf, so you have an archive.