Crucial MX100 2.5" 256GB SATA Solid State Drive Price: $74.99 Shipping Options:: $5 Standard Shipping Estimates: Ships in 3-5 business days. (Wednesday, Nov 18 to Monday, Nov 23) + transit Condition: New
I’ve been thinking about putting an SSD in my old laptop to get some extra life out of it lately. Any computer experts out there know how much time and expertise is needed to swap out a HD and reinstall everything? I already looked up a video on how to remove my HD on my model laptop and it appears that there is significant disassembly and reassembly required, so I’m a little dissuaded by that at the moment.
I just did this w/ 2 lenovo laptops. I put hirens boot disc on a pen drive and put both old and new drives into an old PC. hirens boot disc has HD cloning utilities that will xfer all the data from old drive to new drive pretty quickly.
i used the seagate diskwizard utility which is basically acronis trueimage and it worked perfectly, neither drive was a seagate and it still worked fine.
Yeah, prices have dropped recently, so it’s not a crazy deal, though I certainly paid a bit more for the exact same drive 4 months ago, and have been happy with it. If you’re already in the marked for an ssd of this capacity and feature level, this isn’t a bad way to go.
That’s a different drive. The link goes to the BX100, while Woot’s selling the MX100. The MX100 is $30 more at Amazon.com.
The difference between the two is the controller. The MX100 has slightly better performance and supports some mostly business features like drive encryption.
I bought a BX100 about six weeks ago and have been happy with it. I didn’t feel the MX100 was worth $30 more. At close to the same price I would have bought this one.
Both the MX100 and BX100 have been replaced with newer models.
If you have an older laptop, there should be a cover on the bottom of the machine to remove the old hard drive. Most of the newer machines require you to do quite a bit of work. I.E. Take the keyboard out or have to disassemble the bottom cover, etc.
Macrium Reflect is a free cloning and disk imaging product which is excellent. Just download it - it’s the only software you will need.
You will need an external USB drive enclosure - 2.5 inch to put your SSD drive in. You will then use the Macrium software to clone your existing hard drive to the SSD. Then you install the SSD in the laptop and you are done.
You need to make sure you select the right data alignment on the SSD - Macrium has an option to do this for you and you need to change some settings on your laptop to handle the SSD right.
For instance, you need to turn hibernation off, turn indexing off, make sure your laptop is running in AHCI mode and set your page file to the right size. Just look on the internet and you will find guides to make these changes. Basically, you want to limit your computers writing to the SSD as much as possible to preserve it’s life.
The hardest part will probably be getting your old drive out if its a newer machine.
I can tell you that once you go SSD - you will wonder how you ever lived without it. It’s the single biggest performance boost you can give a computer.
I have a 2009 model Acer laptop (dual-core Intel, 4GB ram). I put in a WD hybrid drive (has 120GB SSD/1TB HDD in a 9mm 2.5" drive). Wow, what a difference! Like having a brand-new laptop, boots up Windows 10 in about 8 seconds. Everything runs so much faster.
I put one of these in my Late 2009 27" iMac about 10 months ago. It’s great. Starts up and launches apps really fast. I’ve had zero problems with it. I got a cheap optical drive bracket from Ebay and swapped out the DVD drive for the SSD.
Yes, the 2009 iMac only supports SATA 2, but the real speed increases are in the random reads & writes, not the continuous ones. The only time you’ll max out the SATA 2 bus speed is on large, continuous reads/writes.
I’ve heard some say that SATA 3 SSDs they’ve put in the optical bay of their iMacs only sync at SATA 1, but this one does sync at SATA 2.
Assuming this hard drive is big enough to take the contents of your old drive, it is not that difficult. Especially since this comes with disk cloning software. Basically you clone your old drive to the new drive. Then swap the drives out. Then you are done. Not very difficult, but it will take some time.
FWIW, I put one of these in my $99 Woot! desktop I picked up last year after I worked out the faulty motherboard bugs, and its now a butt kicking machine. (that’s now about to get upgraded to 32gb mem too so the SO can get some coding done on it). FWIW, I found the Paragon Migrating tool to be well worth the additional outlay for managing conversion to the new SSD. On some machines, the OEM cloning tools just don’t quite work. Paragon…works.
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