I recently purchased a ThinkPad Edge 420. I love it, except the slow platter drive. It was nice to find out it supports the new MSATA SSD's. I ended up purchasing the Intel 310 series 40GB MSATA SSD from New Egg. They seemed to have the best deal and quickest shipping.
I installed the SSD in the small bay between the HDD and battery. I had to find a screw to fasten it down.
Since this was a new computer I didn't bother backing up anything but the drivers and recovery disks.
The drivers folder is here (It would normally be C:)
I did a clean install of windows 7 on the SSD. After installing Windows 7 I updated to SP1 before installing the drivers. I read somewhere that some of the drivers are unstable before SP1. After getting everything updated and installed I ran some benchmarks to compare the results. I used CrystalDiskMark to do the test. For what it's worth I tested the SSD with the OS running off of it, while the HDD didn't. I also used a stop watch to time restart times and was extremely surprised with the results! SSD - 25sec vs. HDD - 65sec
The benchmark results:
Intel 40GB MSATA SSD 410:
I installed the SSD in the small bay between the HDD and battery. I had to find a screw to fasten it down.
Since this was a new computer I didn't bother backing up anything but the drivers and recovery disks.
The drivers folder is here (It would normally be C:)
I did a clean install of windows 7 on the SSD. After installing Windows 7 I updated to SP1 before installing the drivers. I read somewhere that some of the drivers are unstable before SP1. After getting everything updated and installed I ran some benchmarks to compare the results. I used CrystalDiskMark to do the test. For what it's worth I tested the SSD with the OS running off of it, while the HDD didn't. I also used a stop watch to time restart times and was extremely surprised with the results! SSD - 25sec vs. HDD - 65sec
The benchmark results:
Intel 40GB MSATA SSD 410:
Factory 7200 RPM 500GB spinner:
I was a little skeptical installing 64bit Windows 7 on a 40GB drive but I have plenty of space for programs (after all drivers, SP1 and updates I have roughly 20GB free), and then I also have 500GB for all of my documents and files. I did however disable hibernation. The 80GB 310 series is supposed to be almost 2x as fast, but I was able to cut my restart time by over half with the 40GB model.
