The lowest priced aluminum 13-inch MacBook shows the following configuration:

2.0GHz, Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR3 Memory, 160GB hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics, Standard keyboard, Aluminum unibody, $1,299.00 (without tax).

160GB hard drive space is not really a lot these days, even for notebooks. For what I use the laptop I definitely need more hard drive space. So I decided to upgrade the factory installed hard drive (Fujitsu) with a 320GB hard drive (Seagate).

So far I had great experiences with Seagate in regards of all my internal hard drive needs.

The factory built in hard drive is a Fujitsu MHZ2160BH (160GB/8MB Cache/5400rpm) and currently available for about $60 (without tax). I replaced it with a Seagate Momentus ST903203N3A1AS-RK (320GB/16MB Cache/7200rpm) which is currently available for about $130 (without tax). Besides having the double amount of memory I am hoping for a slight speed increase due to higher cache and rpm number. I am also hoping that this hard drive will not be much louder than the factory built in one and doesn't have too much effect on the battery consumption.

Focus:

- Clone content of original hard (Fujitsu) drive to new hard drive (Seagate).
- Replace Fujitsu with Seagate
- Create a backup strategy for the new upgraded hard drive.

First I attached the Seagate to an available USB port of the MacBook through a SATA dock. I then initialized the hard drive and used the application "Super Duper" to clone the Fujitsu hard drive to the new Seagate hard drive. For some reason I can, for the life of me, never remember the application name "Super Duper". I guess it is because the wording "Super Duper" does not contain any hint that would indicate the functionality of the application.
This process took a view hours. After all has been cloned and the new hard drive has been set bootable by "Super Duper" I went ahead and replaced the Fujitsi with the Seagate.
I booted up the computer and all worked well. I adopted the same backup strategy for my MacBook that I use for my Mac Pro. "Super Duper" is my preferred choice for my backups. I actually bought 2 x 320GB Seagate hard drives. One to upgrade/replace the smaller Fujitsu and the other one to backup the new Seagate I replaced the Fujitsu with. To this day I do not use Time Machine for any of my backup needs.