Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

I have an X1 and am thinking of swapping the Mobile Broadband card out and replacing with a mSATA ssd drive. I dont want to replace the HDD with an SSD as I need at least 320GB disk space and the SDD drives exceeding that capacity are too expensive for me.

I am thinking I can fit a 120GB mSATA, transfer the OS to to it and get the best of both worlds...I don't really use the Mobile Broadband as my Android phone acts as a wifi hotspot / has tethering which is good enough for me.

Can I use say a Crucial or OCZ mSATA drive or do I have get hold of an official Lenovo item?

Thanks!

Yeah, mSATA are standard. Or you can buy an ultrabay adapter for a second hard drive and keep WWAN. Optical drives are rarely used today, are probably less useful than mobile boradband. And you can keep the drive in your sleeve just in case.

It's hard to replace the optical drive on a notebook that doesn't have one like the X1.

I don't think there's a Lenovo mSATA with CRU, but I could be wrong. Chances are it's less expensive to just do it yourself anyway.

ZaZ wrote:It's hard to replace the optical drive on a notebook that doesn't have one like the X1.

I don't think there's a Lenovo mSATA with CRU, but I could be wrong. Chances are it's less expensive to just do it yourself anyway.

Thanks - I was planning to stick a Crucial 128GB in - just wanted to be sure - as I had issues years ago swapping the Wifi card on an older Thinkpad - had to hack the BIOS etc.

I will email crucial to confirm first...
Cheers.

ZaZ wrote:It's hard to replace the optical drive on a notebook that doesn't have one like the X1.

I don't think there's a Lenovo mSATA with CRU, but I could be wrong. Chances are it's less expensive to just do it yourself anyway.

Ammm... lapsus brutus... mea culpa...

Just to confirm I successfully installed the Crucial m4 mSATA 128gb SSD into my X1.
After a bit of hassle (my fault) migrating the existing Windows installation from the HDD to the SSD I am now booting from the mSATA drive OK.

EDIT: Someone messaged me asking if I needed to bypass BIOS etc to get the X1 to recognise the Crucial mSata drive - no I did not - it was recognised just fine.
The problem above was more to do with cloning the data from the HDD to the mSata - if memory serves me, I forgot to set the mSATA active..

I successfully installed a Mushkin 120GB mSATA along with a 240GB SanDisk SSD (this required some warranty voiding modification) and have had no issues. The only odd thing I encountered was Windows putting the System Reserved partition on the 240GB since it recognizes the drives in a different order than the BIOS.