SSD for your Laptop

Replace your hard drive with a Solid State Drive in your laptop?

It is possible and in some cases cheaper than a replacement hard drive.

I read a report on a blog where a guy replaced his hard drive with a SSD (Solid State Drive). The drive he picked was a 32 Gig OCZ drive that I wrote a review for in my hardware section. He said that it took almost three hours to complete the install of Windows XP on his new drive.

That may be true, I do not doubt that it will take a long time to install an Operating System on the older SSD drives due to the write speed is about third of the speed a mechanical drive.

What I decided to do is build a network in my RV (see my Networking your RV page) and because this is a vehicle and the computers will be in a rack that is not as shock proof as a laptop on your lap while you are using it in a car I am going to use SSD for my storage. No moving parts, shock resistant to 1500 G's, and lower power consumption. I will not be relying on the laptop battery but the generator in the RV only supplies 6000 watts so the less power draw by computers the better.

This article only shows the SSD's for the T-22 Laptops. I have since installed a 64 Gig SSD in my tower computer and my business T-30 laptop. I find after doing this, I find that the T-30 takes about fifteen seconds to start, if I turned off the diagnostics (memory count and BIOS Post messages) it would boot in five seconds. This is almost instant on!

The IBM T-22 with the SSD 32 Gig drive before installation.

To accomplish this task I have two constraints:

• Speed - needs to be above 40MB/s write speed

• Cost - Needs to cost less than a replacement mechanical drive for the computer.

For the cost factor only two SSD at 32 Gig came close, I chose the Transcend 23 Gig, 2.5" IDE drive TS32GSSD25-M at less than $50 each.

The speed of these drives is 47MB/s , this is not as fast as a mechanical drive.

I am installing these drives in an IBM T-22 and an IBM T-23. One will be my Domain Controller and the other will be my Proxy server.

The 32 Gig SSD drive as it comes out of the box. The heat sink and protective cover is installed

The 32 Gig is installed in the T-22, I did not reinstall the OS I made an image and then placed the image on the new drive, before I put the image on the drive I made a 15 Gig partition and set it to Active, then I put the image on the drive. The image is on an external USB hard drive. It took almost 30 minutes to put the image on the SSD. This is pretty close to a mechanical drive. It took almost 25 minutes to make the image on the USB drive.

The system started up with out any problems what so ever

The heat sink and protective cover.

The second 32 Gig is installed in the T-23, it was also an image and not a fresh install.

On the left is the original 40 Gig drive that came with the T-23, all in all the drive has lasted for a long time and now gets a well deserved rest. I will keep it as a spare. On the right is the new 32 Gig SSD with the bezel installed ready to insert in to the slot.

Inserting the drive in the bay, then I will partition the drive in to four partitions, one for the swap file, one for the web site that will be on the computer, and one for apps  that I keep on all computers.

Job done, I have all three laptops ready to go in to the rack that I am building for the RV.

Here is a review you may be interested in, I needed an external drive, so I decided that I would use a SSD because they now come with a usb connector also. Read what happened when I decided to not follow my own advice.

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