W510 - Possible to swap HDD for SSD?

[carixus]

As far as we know Lenovo offers some SSD's for the Thinkpad W510, but is it smoothly possible to exchange the built-in HDD for a SSD from a diffrent manufacturer (e.g. Intel X25-M G2 Postville)? Any adapter needed?

[RonS]

I swapped my W510's OEM 320GB hard drive for a Samsung SSD. It's very easy. I created a set of restore CD's, swapped drives, and restored onto the SSD. No problem.

[radiodavid]

I swapped my W510's OEM 320GB hard drive for a Samsung SSD. It's very easy. I created a set of restore CD's, swapped drives, and restored onto the SSD. No problem.

I had a similar experience. I cloned the system's original drive onto a Kingston 512 gb ssd using Acronis in clone drive mode (the Kingston was in an eSATA dock) and then put the original factory Lenovo drive away as my system backup. The whole process took perhaps 40 minutes, and the new drive mounts perfectly in the drive bay.

I am awaiting the arrival of a drive caddy in the new form factor for the W510... it has been delayed twice... and I will have a Samsung 256 gb ssd in it and do daily clone backups to it so that I can either swap drives if the main fails or use it to restore if need be.

The W510 does not protest or object in any manner to this procedure.

[Crunch]

Yup, same here. I never use the hard drive supplied with new ThinkPads these days, because I buy the SSD's somewhere other than Lenovo. Anywhere else is less expensive than most computer manufacturer. I use the disk cloning feature in Acronis True Image.

I wish I could order them without any hard drive, and without an OS. Hmm, maybe specify Linux as the OS. I read that ThinkPads can be configured that way, and Linux doesn't require the purchase of a license, does it?

[Volker]

I wish I could order them without any hard drive, and without an OS. Hmm, maybe specify Linux as the OS. I read that ThinkPads can be configured that way, and Linux doesn't require the purchase of a license, does it?

I'm sure Lenovo will be more than happy to accommodate you as long as you buy a few thousand

[jumboloan]

I've got a Samsung 128GB SSD that is full and my new 256 GB is coming. I have a 512GB disk drive in the CD ROM bay that I use for Acronis Non-stop backup, it has saved my bacon a lot.

I also use Acronis Disk clone also so I can boot from the 512GB. But my question is that it takes so long to do a clone drive on my Windows C: over to the disk drive and more importantly I have to reboot and Acronis does this from DOS. Is there some way or tool where I can do a copy my C: partition while I'm checking email and such over to my other drive. Then I could do this every day instead of every week.