How to Upgrade Your Netbook's Hard Drive or SSD

A time existed when your netbook’s portability was enough to get you excited about computing. But your mini-notebook’s lost some of its original luster; the sluggish hard drive opens applications too slowly, and it’s just too small to hold all your music and videos. Fortunately, it’s easy to put some spice back in your relationship.

If your netbook uses a standard 2.5-inch, 5,400-rpm hard drive, as the Toshiba mini NB205 and most netbooks made in the past 12 months do, it’s easy to replace that lethargic drive with a larger, faster SSD.

But what if your older netbook—such as an ASUS Eee PC 901 or Dell Inspiron Mini 9—uses a small SSD chip? Never fear. There’s an upgrade disk available for nearly every make and model of netbook on the market today, making it easy to increase the size and speed of your storage. For this how-to we used the 32GB Super Talent FPM32GHAE, which costs $83 on www.newegg.com.