MCE announced the immediate availability of their 2.5 inch, 320 GB MobileStor Performance drive upgrade for MacBooks and MacBook Pros on Tuesday. For a limited time, the upgrade includes a 2.5 inch portable external enclosure with USB 2 and FireWire interfaces for the old drive.

Also included are SuperDuper! cloning/backup software, all tools required for installation, and an illustrated installation manual.

"The 320GB MobileStor Performance total hard drive upgrade solution provides not only an unprecedented hard drive capacity for the MacBook Pro and MacBook, but also provides every single piece of equipment necessary to successfully complete the hard drive upgrade and transfer all information from the original drive to the new one. It also allows for the continued use of the original SATA hard drive for backing up or general portable external storage," said Arnold Ramirez, president of MCE.

The 320 GB Hard Drive features a rotational speed of 5400 RPM and a maximum sustained data transfer rate of over 75 MB/sec, according to MCE. The drive also features Native Command Queing (NCQ) in which the drive automatically reorders commands in the most efficient way based on the location of data on its platters in order to retrieve that data with the least latency. S.M.A.R.T. status monitoring is also supported and can warn of possible or impending disk failure long before one actually occurs. The drive’s S.M.A.R.T. status can be verified using Apple’s Disk Utility or System Profiler program.

The 320 GB MobileStor Performance hard drive upgrade solution is compatible with the 17 inch and 15 inch MacBook Pro and the 13.3 inch MacBook. It is priced at US$349.00.