Upgrading Your Notebook Hard Drive: The $299 Way and the $87 Way

The CMS 160GB EasyEncrypt Drive Upgrade Kit replaces your old hard drive with a new, encrypted one, and even lets you keep the old drive around for external storage. Sounds like a good solution -- except for the $299 price tag. Here's how you can accomplish the same thing for under $90.

The CMS kit (pictured) includes a 160GB SATA drive, a USB enclosure, and cloning software. The basic process works like this: Run the software to copy your existing drive to the new one, then swap the latter into your notebook. The old drive goes into the enclosure, giving you convenient USB-powered storage. As for the new drive, it offers always-on, government-grade AES 128 encryption.

I went shopping online and found a 160GB Fujitsu SATA drive for $79.99 and a USB enclosure for $6.99. Grand total: $87. As for the cloning software, look no further than freeware gem DriveImage XML, which accomplishes the same thing as the software bundled with the kit. Need help? Lifehacker shows you how to use DriveImage XML to clone your hard drive.

Finally, if you want the kind of encryption touted by CMS, you can get that free of charge as well: TrueCrypt, which I recently mentioned as a solution for protecting flash-drive data, can encrypt entire hard drives. And there you go! You just saved $212.