X1C1 SSD replacement with eBay DIY SSD success

[aabram]

Coming from this topic X1 Carbon Gen-1 UNICORN found: a real 20+6-Pin-to-mSATA adapter I thought I'd make a separate post just for visibility.

I successfully replaced my X1 Carbon 1st gen (2012) dinky 128GB proprietary SSD with this one from eBay: 256GB SSD for ThinkPad X1 Carbon. It's a DIY hack but it works.

Here's what it looks like:
http://i.imgur.com/QWVOn88.jpg

Here's it inserted. It's a bit wider than original so speaker cable gets in the way. There's no room to wiggle the cable around because SSD blocks the contacts anyway.
http://i.imgur.com/y4kkhoS.jpg

So I just placed it on top of speaker cable and fixed it with original screw which holds it in place. It's a bit higher now than original setup but not much. It does not produce any bulge under the keyboard.
http://i.imgur.com/S7bZE71.jpg

Here it is in place, ready to be covered with keyboard.
http://i.imgur.com/1bS6eph.jpg

And here's the boot screen, BIOS recognised it immediately.
http://i.imgur.com/tfKXfeX.jpg

Imgur album has few more images, if you're interested.

The trickiest part was to get my (actually wife's) stuff back from old drive because I can't attach this old SSD to any adapter that I happen to have (and I have lots of them). I made drive image with Driveimage XML to external HDD just in case. I then replaced the HDD and instead of booting from some sort of rescue drive decided to reinstall instead. I could've booted it up with bootable thumb drive, but I decided to do clean install instead. Fortunately I had activated Windows 10 on this computer so I could just make bootable Win 10 install thumb drive with Windows Media Creation Tool and install Windows 10 again. Then I connected external HDD with Driveimage XML backup image from old drive and browsed the contents, extracting files I want to copy over to new SSD.

That's it. Now I have X1 Carbon 1st gen with normal size SSD. I haven't run any tests yet but this new SSD appears to be quite a bit faster than original drive was.


Warning: pictures WAY too BIG. Tags removed. Please read Forum Rules: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=14339

[RealBlackStuff]

Thanks for posting this.
If that were mine, I would just cut the "copper-plated" corner with mounting hole out, that now covers the speaker connector.
After that it would be a perfect fit!

[w0qj]

Wow, many thanks for your sharing!

Sure gives some hope to some of us who are also looking for a way out with a viable SSD replacement for X1C3 (Generation 3),
which has SSD with the (apparently outdated) ACHI format.

By the way, noticed in your signature that you are probably using a very new T450s.
Would love to get our hands on a "X450s" however

Cheers!