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Replacing Laptop Hard Drive with a SSD

fiatlux

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Posted December 16, 2012 at 11:08AM

Hi,

I am thinking of buying a cheaper ultra (or near ultra) laptop. These seem to typically come with a 500gb HD with a mSATA cache drive (normally about 32gb).

To keep the weight of the machine down, but more importantly keeping the heat and fan noise down, and the performance boost - I want to replace the 500gb HD with a SSD(a slim 128gb model).

Do I remove just the HD, or the mSATA drive as well??

The laptop will be running Windows 8 and it will be a clean install, so I won't need to worry about cloning the HD first.

Any advise will be appreciated.

Thanks Adrian

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Fruit Bat /\0/\

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Posted December 16, 2012 at 12:27PM

You need to read your motherboard’s manual but I’m pretty sure that the mSATA port is used strictly to cache a HDD with an O/S installed on it.

If you can only afford a 64GB SSD then use the mSATA drive.

If you can afford a large capacity SSD then forget about mSATA.

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Chronos the 2nd

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Posted December 16, 2012 at 12:29PM

Would be useful to know make and model of laptop you are talking about.

As for installing a SSD to lighten the weight the difference between the existing HDD and a SSD is so small to be negligible. What fan noise are you talking about as there is not one for the hard-drive?

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fiatlux

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Posted December 16, 2012 at 12:35PM

Fruit Bat/Chronos,

Thanks for the replies

The smallest SSD would be 128gb.

Regarding noise... it is more the noise from the laptop fan because of the heat caused by the hard drive, although I appreciate that other things get hot - its just one less thing.

Thanks Adrian

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rdave13

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Posted December 16, 2012 at 12:57PM

Regarding the msata drive on a laptop, I'm wondering if it is used similar to the 'ReadyBoost' idea and cashe as Fruit Bat /\0/\ mentions. If it is then I'd change the HDD for an SSD. The problem with that is, if you change your normal HD to SSD will the mSATA drive be needed?

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Fruit Bat /\0/\

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Posted December 16, 2012 at 1:58PM

Laptop hard drives don't seem to get anywhere near as hot as desktop drives.

Personally apart from a slightly faster boot time you aren't really gaining anything and losing a lot of disk space.

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