Upgrading my Macbook pro: questions

HI guys,
I have the 13" i5 2.3 ghz MBP from 2011, I mainly use this for coding but I am planning to upgrade this machine to use it for some audio recording ( my windows machine which i use for audio recording keeps crashing so Ive decided to ditch it). I have an external audio card(echo audiofire 4). I plan to get an external monitor as well

I plan to upgrade to 8gb of RAM(which I have identified through crucial.com)

I have two questions:

(1) I plan on upgrading my hard drive from the 320 gb 5400 rpm to 750 gb 7200 rpm(cant afford an SSD right now). I have read conflicting reports on upgrading the hard drive to this spec. Are there hard drives with this spec that people have successfully upgraded to? if so which model?

(2) I took the option of having snow leapord installed on my machine when apple sent it to me, so I dont have an install disk. How can i backup everything to shift to the new hard drive?


cheers

1. Any 2.5" 9.5 mm high SATA drive will work. This covers almost all of them. Some of the 750GB and 1TB drives are 11 or 12mm tall.

2. SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner.

Words can't begin to stress how strongly I encourage you to purchase a Snow Leopard disc or purchase Lion and create your own USB install disk. Before, you go to playing with your disk.

bobtomay said:

1. Any 2.5" 9.5 mm high SATA drive will work. This covers almost all of them. Some of the 750GB and 1TB drives are 11 or 12mm tall.

2. SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner.

Words can't begin to stress how strongly I encourage you to purchase a Snow Leopard disc or purchase Lion and create your own USB install disk. Before, you go to playing with your disk.

Click to expand...

well technically i did purchase snow leapord but they didnt send me the disk, it just came installed on my mac...im not upgrading to lion because a lot of my stuff isnt compatible with lion.....

why do u stress this though? does the method u mentioned not work?

and thanks for the drives specifications