Over at the Lenovo “Inside the Box” blog, Matt Kohut reported on swapping his existing 7200rpm 2.5-inch hard drive for a 1.8-inch 64GB Solid State Drive (SSD) in his ThinkPad. It did involve using an adapter from a 1.8-inch form factor to a 2.5-inch form factor.
This was the same 1.8-inch 64GB Samsung SSD found in the 13.3-inch Lenovo ThinkPad X300.
Using Acronis’ Migrate Easy software, he copied everything over to the SSD using an Ultrabay adapter, then replaced his existing mechanical hard drive with the SSD.
His comments on performance, heat, and battery life are interesting:
The difference was immediate and dramatic. Boot time was cut in half. Our corporate email program and instant messaging program also load in one half of the time they used to. Even opening and closing large MS Office PowerPoint files is a much faster operation than ever before. Though all of those were enough to make me go “Wow!,†here is the most surprising thing of all: my web browsing has become noticeably much zippier. Pages literally just snap into place. I never thought browsing was slow before, so the difference is all the more dramatic. A few more observations:
# This drive definitely runs cooler. I can’t even feel it under my palm rest like I could with my old drive.
# Battery life has definitely improved. When I am actively using my PC, I get about an extra 20 – 30 minutes per charge. When I’m doing something more passive (at least from a system perspective) like email, my battery life is now about an hour longer than before.