It uses a 3.5" desktop HDD, the original one was a Seagate 512G. I'm going to replace it with a Seagate 1T.
The original plan was the following:
1. Clone the original hard drive
2. Disassembly the Inspiron
3. Replace the hard drive
But then the cloning process was not very successful. The way I did was to connect the new hard drive with a USB to SATA cable, and then clone from the internal hard driver. However, I soon realize that the sector size was different, and none of the software that I tried could do the clone. I believe even a "dd" won't work. I found that internal drive had 512 bytes sector size, while USB connect drive had 4K sector size and that is the source of the problem.
Finally, I backup the original drive and then install the new hard drive, followed by restore from the backup image. It works flawlessly, Windows 8 does not complain about the change of hardware. I've created a new partition with the added space and it works fine, too.
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