How I put an Intel SSD into my T60p
Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2008 10:56 am
I wanted to give this forum a cookbook description of putting an Intel X25-M into my T60p, so if you want to do it, it might be easier for you.
I used Acronis True Image Home version 10.0, which is what I use for backups. I have an external USB drive, and with a couple clicks, I have Acronis back up the T60p drive to the USB, about daily. It's a great program to have, and you use it to move to the SSD drive as well.
You can't use your external USB drive for the clone. You need to have the Intel SSD attached to the T60p. I used a RocketFish SATA hard drive enclosure kit, RF-AHD25 for that. Got it at Best Buy for $50. It's a little metal case into which you put an SATA hard drive, and then you can connect that drive to your computer with a USB or eSATA cable.
You follow the directions to install the Intel SSD into the RocketFish. At first, I thought I'd have to take the RocketFish back, because the design makes it difficult to physically insert the Intel's connector into the RocketFish Socket. It took me about 5 minutes of careful trying, and I got it. If you get the RocketFish at Best Buy, and you're nervous about this step, you might want to take your Intel to the store and have the Geek Squad guys put it in to the RocketFish for you before you leave.
Offload enough data from your HDD so you only have about 60gig or less left. SSD's aren't huge storage yet.
Plug the RocketFish into the T60p, and use the "Clone drive" function of Acronis, following the directions. Here is the first of a two-page cookbook on this step:
http://www.brighthub.com/computing/hard ... 16043.aspx
... that is not extremely complete, but helpful.
One thing to note is that when you set up the partitions for the Intel, you want to create a "service" partition the same size as the one on your Thinkpad. Read the link above. Tell Acronis that you want to "manually" set up the partition sizes. If the sizes are not yet exactly what you want, have the "Proceed Relayout" check box checked before going to the next page (that check box tells Acronis that you still want to change partition sizes). You can use the back button, the "Proceed Relayout" box, and keep changing partition sizes until you get what you want. It takes a little playing around so you don't wind up with a gig of Unallocated space.
Then tell Acronis to go ahead. It will reboot the computer, do the clone on bootup (took me about 45 minutes moving from a 200gig HDD with 50 gig of data), and then Acronis will shut down the computer. Acronis says that it fixes the master boot records, too.
You can restart with your old HDD if you want and use Windows Explorer to browse around the new drive.
Shut down the computer and put the Intel in the T60p's HDD slot. The Intel comes with its own rubber bumpers, but still put it in the entire case and rubber guides that your current HDD has around it.
It booted up right away for me. Nothing else to do at all.
Now for a little objective and subjective data, and then commentary.
Objective:
Booting up Windows XP: to get to the login screen was 44 seconds before the SSD, 24 seconds after. To get to the desktop: 55 seconds before SSD, 33 seconds after. To get to the point where my 12 icons are loaded up in the system tray: 1:36 before, 53 seconds after.
As you know, you still can't load programs quickly as soon as the system tray icons load, because Windows is still doing its startup housekeeping. To boot up and load Windows Explorer, Firefox, Eudora (my mail client), and Adobe Photoshop took 3:00 beofre the SSD, and 1:17 after. The time to close Windows didn't seem to change.
Subjective:
When I upgraded from a 5400rpm 100gig HDD to my 7200 200gig Hitachi, I noticed a big difference, and the difference with this SSD is HUGE!!! Even when a program doesn't need to move a lot of data, it has to read or touch many files to open or close, and the 80 nanosecond seek time does wonders. Opening Photoshop, which used to be a wait, is now blisteringly fast. Closing Photoshop is now instantaneous, whereas closing it used to be a wait, too. Searching the hard disk for a file -- wow, superfast.
I do no gaming at all. I use the computer for programming, image manipulation, email. I typically have 10-20 programs open at a time: a few telnet windows, html and perl editors, Photoshop, a few browsers, email client, ftp client, Microsoft Word and Excel. It seems now like I upgraded the processor from 2gHz to about 500gHz. There were posts discussing that this SSD is throttled to about 100Mb/sec on a Thinkpad, but I rarely need to move that much data around, so the limitation doesn't affect me. The vast majority of my waits are waiting for the sloth-like magnetic heads on the conventional HDD to move into position. Opening and closing programs is soooooo fast. Anything that is disk-intensive. It's also a little wierd that there is no HDD sound now.
Commentary:
Am I saving much actual time with this HDD? I don't know. Certainly the computer seems like a new computer. A couple of years ago, I wanted to upgrade from my T43p to a T61p, right when the T61's came out. The T61p's screen was so terrible, I sent it back and got a T60p. Then, the W-series came out, but I won't "upgrade" to an inferior screen. Also, an upgrade is difficult for me, since I have about a million programs on this computer, and re-installing everything takes over a week.
For the programs I run, it's hard to imagine that a W-series with a conventional HDD isn't *much* slower than this T60p with an SSD. And I've got the great screen. It's running XP Pro SP2. I haven't seen a bsd in two years. I can run a million programs simultaneously, including backup programs, background defragmenters antivirus and antimalware, search the whole hdd, Explorer copying 40 gig of material to an external drive, any number of other things simultaneously, and XP doesn't care. I don't save that much time booting up Windows because I almost always suspend the machine rather than shut it down. I only reboot Windows when Windows Update or some installation requires it.
In fact, since Lenovo doesn't seem to care about screen quality, I'm thinking that my next upgrade will be to get another T60p and put it on the shelf, so if someone sits on this one and crushes it, I'm back in business in the time it takes me to take the little screw off of the HDD slot cover. Question for the forum: if I do that, do I need to get the exact same model number, or will *any* T60p suffice?
So I think I have the best Thinkpad right now: a T60p with a SSD. Hopefully this post will help you make the switch if you are ready to try.
--Steve
I used Acronis True Image Home version 10.0, which is what I use for backups. I have an external USB drive, and with a couple clicks, I have Acronis back up the T60p drive to the USB, about daily. It's a great program to have, and you use it to move to the SSD drive as well.
You can't use your external USB drive for the clone. You need to have the Intel SSD attached to the T60p. I used a RocketFish SATA hard drive enclosure kit, RF-AHD25 for that. Got it at Best Buy for $50. It's a little metal case into which you put an SATA hard drive, and then you can connect that drive to your computer with a USB or eSATA cable.
You follow the directions to install the Intel SSD into the RocketFish. At first, I thought I'd have to take the RocketFish back, because the design makes it difficult to physically insert the Intel's connector into the RocketFish Socket. It took me about 5 minutes of careful trying, and I got it. If you get the RocketFish at Best Buy, and you're nervous about this step, you might want to take your Intel to the store and have the Geek Squad guys put it in to the RocketFish for you before you leave.
Offload enough data from your HDD so you only have about 60gig or less left. SSD's aren't huge storage yet.
Plug the RocketFish into the T60p, and use the "Clone drive" function of Acronis, following the directions. Here is the first of a two-page cookbook on this step:
http://www.brighthub.com/computing/hard ... 16043.aspx
... that is not extremely complete, but helpful.
One thing to note is that when you set up the partitions for the Intel, you want to create a "service" partition the same size as the one on your Thinkpad. Read the link above. Tell Acronis that you want to "manually" set up the partition sizes. If the sizes are not yet exactly what you want, have the "Proceed Relayout" check box checked before going to the next page (that check box tells Acronis that you still want to change partition sizes). You can use the back button, the "Proceed Relayout" box, and keep changing partition sizes until you get what you want. It takes a little playing around so you don't wind up with a gig of Unallocated space.
Then tell Acronis to go ahead. It will reboot the computer, do the clone on bootup (took me about 45 minutes moving from a 200gig HDD with 50 gig of data), and then Acronis will shut down the computer. Acronis says that it fixes the master boot records, too.
You can restart with your old HDD if you want and use Windows Explorer to browse around the new drive.
Shut down the computer and put the Intel in the T60p's HDD slot. The Intel comes with its own rubber bumpers, but still put it in the entire case and rubber guides that your current HDD has around it.
It booted up right away for me. Nothing else to do at all.
Now for a little objective and subjective data, and then commentary.
Objective:
Booting up Windows XP: to get to the login screen was 44 seconds before the SSD, 24 seconds after. To get to the desktop: 55 seconds before SSD, 33 seconds after. To get to the point where my 12 icons are loaded up in the system tray: 1:36 before, 53 seconds after.
As you know, you still can't load programs quickly as soon as the system tray icons load, because Windows is still doing its startup housekeeping. To boot up and load Windows Explorer, Firefox, Eudora (my mail client), and Adobe Photoshop took 3:00 beofre the SSD, and 1:17 after. The time to close Windows didn't seem to change.
Subjective:
When I upgraded from a 5400rpm 100gig HDD to my 7200 200gig Hitachi, I noticed a big difference, and the difference with this SSD is HUGE!!! Even when a program doesn't need to move a lot of data, it has to read or touch many files to open or close, and the 80 nanosecond seek time does wonders. Opening Photoshop, which used to be a wait, is now blisteringly fast. Closing Photoshop is now instantaneous, whereas closing it used to be a wait, too. Searching the hard disk for a file -- wow, superfast.
I do no gaming at all. I use the computer for programming, image manipulation, email. I typically have 10-20 programs open at a time: a few telnet windows, html and perl editors, Photoshop, a few browsers, email client, ftp client, Microsoft Word and Excel. It seems now like I upgraded the processor from 2gHz to about 500gHz. There were posts discussing that this SSD is throttled to about 100Mb/sec on a Thinkpad, but I rarely need to move that much data around, so the limitation doesn't affect me. The vast majority of my waits are waiting for the sloth-like magnetic heads on the conventional HDD to move into position. Opening and closing programs is soooooo fast. Anything that is disk-intensive. It's also a little wierd that there is no HDD sound now.
Commentary:
Am I saving much actual time with this HDD? I don't know. Certainly the computer seems like a new computer. A couple of years ago, I wanted to upgrade from my T43p to a T61p, right when the T61's came out. The T61p's screen was so terrible, I sent it back and got a T60p. Then, the W-series came out, but I won't "upgrade" to an inferior screen. Also, an upgrade is difficult for me, since I have about a million programs on this computer, and re-installing everything takes over a week.
For the programs I run, it's hard to imagine that a W-series with a conventional HDD isn't *much* slower than this T60p with an SSD. And I've got the great screen. It's running XP Pro SP2. I haven't seen a bsd in two years. I can run a million programs simultaneously, including backup programs, background defragmenters antivirus and antimalware, search the whole hdd, Explorer copying 40 gig of material to an external drive, any number of other things simultaneously, and XP doesn't care. I don't save that much time booting up Windows because I almost always suspend the machine rather than shut it down. I only reboot Windows when Windows Update or some installation requires it.
In fact, since Lenovo doesn't seem to care about screen quality, I'm thinking that my next upgrade will be to get another T60p and put it on the shelf, so if someone sits on this one and crushes it, I'm back in business in the time it takes me to take the little screw off of the HDD slot cover. Question for the forum: if I do that, do I need to get the exact same model number, or will *any* T60p suffice?
So I think I have the best Thinkpad right now: a T60p with a SSD. Hopefully this post will help you make the switch if you are ready to try.
--Steve