Upgrading Laptop HDD to SSD

Marine-RX179

Marine-RX179

Marine-RX179

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A friend of mine has a Toshiba Satellite P300-18M (spec here), and he not too happy with performance of it (probably with Windows Vista being the main cause). I'm thinking of helping him to upgrade his HDD to a SSD (most likely a the Crucial M4 64GB) and installing Windows 7.

I have always been a desktop user and never owned a laptop myself, so there's a few things I would like to make sure before proceeding:

i) from the spec list on the Toshiba site, it listed the HDD as 500 (250+250) GB, so am I right to assume that the laptop has two physical 2.5" HDD (slots), so I can simply removed one of the 250GB HDD and replace it with the SSD while keeping the other 250GB HDD intacted?

ii) do I enter bios same as desktop by pressing delete at boot?


Cheers.
 
I would doubt it has 2 HDDs, havent seen one with 2 before, but I may be wrong, but space limitations normally prohibit this, it may be one drive partitioned into 2

Yes
 
Yes I believe so, though obviously if it is only one HDD in there and you stick in a SSD, storage will become limited, and I suspect it will be SATA 3Gb/s so may not make full use of the newer speeds but it should still work. Id update BIOS before starting just to make sure it can recognise it
 
These do have 2 drives in them, like a lot of 17" laptops... for example my DV9500 HP laptop also has two hard drives.

So yes replace one with an SSD for the OS is a great move, I would advise installing the latest bios but keep in mind the M4 your looks at is going to be seriously limited by the SATA2 controller in the laptop.

Might be better just going for a high end SATA2 drive unless you think its likly to maybe be moved to another machine in the future which would take advantage of it...
 
Thx Surveyor and gamesaregood.

Yes I am awared that the Crucial M4 is gonna be bottlenecked by the SATA2.0, but considering SATA3.0 SSD are backward compatable with SATA2.0, and the price level of the SATA3.0 and SATA2.0 SSD are practically the same, it would make more sense to just get a SATA3.0 SSD and use the SATA2.0 connection to the max it can, rather then getting a SATA2.0 SSD that might not reach the max speed of SATA2.0...no?
 
Looking at the prices of SSDs I guess I have to agree. You can use the M4 later on for another laptop/desktop if your friend wishes to replace it. The question is however, does the laptop support AHCI? Without AHCI TRIM functions won't be avaliable. However, it will greatly speed up boot times on the laptop.

What does he do on the laptop that requires more performance? Maybe boosting the RAM to 4gb might help as well.
 
Orcvader said:
Looking at the prices of SSDs I guess I have to agree. You can use the M4 later on for another laptop/desktop if your friend wishes to replace it. The question is however, does the laptop support AHCI? Without AHCI TRIM functions won't be avaliable. However, it will greatly speed up boot times on the laptop.

What does he do on the laptop that requires more performance? Maybe boosting the RAM to 4gb might help as well.
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That laptop already have 3GB of ram. As for TRIM I don't think it is neccessary for him, as the SSD is will only use improving the boot time and responsiveness on general programs and windows, and don't think he's gonna delete any software once they are installed onto the SSD. Storage will be using one of the existing 250GB HDD.
 
Fair enough on the 2 drives, not seen that before, I was only speculating, good find
Yes true if the price difference is negligible then go for the M4 still
 
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