How do I make an image of my drive on laptop to get SSD?

Thinking of purchasing a new hard drive for my i7 laptop. It's an HP system that is a couple of years old. It has a toshiba hard drive 500GB. I am thinking that is what is causing to be "slow" compared to even my old laptop. Things just aren't that snappy. Just wondering though. How do I make an image of my hard drive with a laptop since there is only one bay for a drive? Is there a "kit" that would enable it to be ran as a external usb drive to get it done ?

I used this:
http://www.apricorn.com/sata-wire-3.html

The last time that I wanted to upgrade my single drive notebook. Thankfully now I have a two drive notebook which makes things like backups a bit quicker.

Nice thing about this unit is that I've been using it now as an external usb drive. When I swapped in the new SSD (that had the cloned info on it) I continued to use the original drive connected to this device on an as needed basis to backup data as it will read just as a usb drive. So I often swap it between my desktop and my laptops when I want to share data quicker than trying to move it across our home lan.

And now the Warnings:
It only works with 2.5" drives. I tried hooking it up to a typical Desktop sized drive and the computer didn't even notice anything was connected, but we are talking about laptops so that shouldn't be a problem.


The other thing I experienced is that I was using this as a simple USB drive after cloning my drive and when I took that hdd and plugged it into an SATA port on my desktop (figuring I'd just do it that way to get faster transfers) it wouldn't work, it wanted to do something to the MBR which ended up wiping the drive, once it was cleaned and reformatted though it worked fine as another internal drive to my desktop. Again most people won't do that but it's something to be aware of.