upgrading hdd and cloning

I bought a 13" MacBook Pro in Nov '09, with the standard 250gb hard drive. I am now down to 8 gb of free space, and that was only after I finally backed up and removed some videos of my kid I really want to replace the hdd with something much bigger, so I can keep the videos on there, and not run out of room again in the next 6 months. I'm thinking at least a size of 640gb (western digital). I found the steps on how to physically remove and replace the drive, however, I'm looking for answers on the best way to move the data over to the new drive.

I have "HDClone" which is a self-booting clone tool, and a case to make the internal hard drive an external. My usual plan of attack for windows machines is to clone the drive onto the external, then just pop the external into the laptop, and voila, it's like the same system, but with more space. But I've never tried this on a mac, and I'm not sure this is still the best route. Heck, I can't even verify that HDClone works with drives formatted for macs. I don't use Time Machine for backups, since I don't have an external drive big enough (my biggest one is 160gb), and my backups are done using online storage (jungle disk).

So will my normal plan work (cloning using HDClone onto the external, and then swapping the drives)? Or is there a better way??

Appreciate any advice/tips!!

 

Nice! Definitely will check out CCC... looks much better than my old school program I saw the 1TB drives, but it looked like the 640gb ones got better ratings. But if I can find a great one, I'll never turn away more space!!

 

Nice! Thanks for the links, I'm a newegg regular, and just ordered the 750gb. Can't wait!