Installing a SSD in my x201s

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of finally picking up my Intel X25-M SSD. After classes ended, I spent a good amount of time playing around with this spectacular piece of technology, and I thought I'd share my experience with those of you planning on upgrading your ThinkPads.

First thing I did before even opening my SSD packaging was to create recovery disks using Lenovo's Factory Recovery Disks program (Control Panel). I opted to use factory recovery disks as opposed to a clean installation, because I generally find the factory state to be stable and provide proper drivers. I used my external hard drive to do this, and it took a little while over USB 2.0. In the meantime, I ripped apart the minimal OEM packaging in which I received my SSD, and I immediately noticed that the back metal plating and the black spacer both looked worn. Upon closer inspection, it looked like the SATA connector was used at least once. I hoped that this was just because I ordered an OEM product (factory testing induced wear).

When the factory disks finished imaging themselves onto my external, I shut down my machine and removed the battery. On the backside, you will find one small screw located near the edge. Unscrewing it will allow you to remove the hard drive cover, revealing a black tab tucked into the case. Pull out that tab and carefully use it to pull the hard drive mounting bay. There are rubber stoppers around the hard drive which will resist being pulled. Once the hard drive is out, remove the rubber gaskets on the sides of the hard drive and locate four screws used to mount the drive bay onto the disk drive. Replacing the hard drive with the SSD is just a matter of putting the SSD into the drive bay, replacing the screws and rubber railing, sliding the drive securely back into the laptop, and replacing the cover. I purchased an external enclosure for a thrifty $13 off the Egg as a new home for the 160GB drive my ThinkPad shipped with. I connected the Serial to USB bridge to my hard drive and ensured that my 160GB hard drive have been salvaged. More importantly, I can access the factory recovery disk creation tool if I need to. I was sure that everything is firmly where it belongs in my ThinkPad, so I booted my machine after connecting my external HDD that had the factory recovery image.

Initially, I attempted to boot from the SSD just to make sure that it was recognized properly. It showed the model number and then subsequently rebooted since there was no boot table on the drive. On that restart, I selected to boot from my external which launched the Rescue and Recovery environment. I followed the procedure and the program began imaging my SSD. This took about 20 minutes -- no faster than it was on my 5400RPM HDD.

After the imaging completed, I restarted and tested interrupting the boot by pressing the blue ThinkVantage button. Flawlessly, I entered the R&R environment from my SSD. I'm thrilled to let you all know that using the factory recovery disks to reformat your hard drive restores/installs R&R properly. I had to do the first use setup for Windows 7 which went by fairly quickly and painlessly. I only noticed minimal speed boosts during all this. However, at this point, I could boot into Windows on my new SSD! I confirmed that the ThinkPad tools were all present (PM et al.).

From creating the factory recovery disks to running Windows on my SSD took about 1.5 hours. Not a big deal at all. However, things got more complicated from here. In the remainder of the post, whenever I mention a problem, it's exactly what I personally ran into. After installing Intel SSD Toolbox, I found out that my firmware was version 02HA while the latest firmware was 02HD. I also noticed that defrag wasn't turned off and Win7 detected my hard drive as fragmentable. All this leads to me thinking that Win7 doesn't know I installed a SSD. Hoping that the firmware update will fix it, I downloaded the ISO containing the firmware update.

Problem: There's no optical drive on the x201s, but you need to install firmware before booting into Windows.
Solution: After a hefty session with Google, I followed this guide:

http://communities.intel.com/message/86051;jsessionid=D9C5E7CAB823E5AE71F41C3B97A40011.node5COMS

Basically, I loaded DOS onto a flash drive, copied the firmware ISO onto the root of the flash drive alongside DOS, booted into DOS, and ran the firmware update from there. Clever, no? Now, note that you have to edit the BIOS before doing this! Before booting from the flash drive, go into the BIOS > Config > Serial ATA. Change AHCI to Compatibility. DOS can't properly communicate via AHCI.

Problem: Booting back into Windows after the firmware update, I'd get to Windows logo and then BSOD. I freaked out. I did a factory install again (which, by the by, indicates that the drive wasn't bricked) only to find that I still saw the BSOD.
Solution: I realized after a while that I didn't flip the BIOS setting back to AHCI. Yeah, complete facepalm. I went through the first use setup in Windows again and everything ran fine until...

Problem: Defrag was still on! Either the SSD is not reporting itself as a SSD or Win7 fails. In either case, I needed to enable TRIM and stop SSD unfriendly services.
Solution: http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/win...-ultimate-solid-state-drive-speed-tweaks.html Also, be sure to check if TRIM is enabled by running "fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify" in command prompt without quotes.

Now, I'm a CS student and I need *nix to develop...Usually, I use Ubuntu on a 10GB partition. I went into Win7's storage manager and tried to shrink the main partition.
Problem: Win7 reported that the service could not be found and just gave me an error. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't shrink my partition.
Solution: Those of you interested in dual-booting or simply creating new partitions on your SSD will find a ridiculous fix for this. Apparently, you need to have the defrag service enabled to shrink volumes (but not to expand volumes). I temporarily turned on defrag just to create a partition. If you're curious to know, I didn't end up installing Ubuntu because of graphics issues, and I wasted a good 4 hours trying to figure out what was going on. I suppose I'll just wait till 10.04 comes out.

I settled with playing around with my Windows installation, but during usage, I couldn't help but notice that my drive activity light was constantly flashing.
Problem: I use sysinternals Process Explorer to see which processes are making I/O requests, and I found that TpShocks.exe is really doing a lot of read/writes. TpShocks.exe is the shock detection ThinkPads ship with. It's used for the Lenovo AirBag Protection tool that temporarily stops hard drive spin in order to reduce spindle/head damage. Since SSDs have no moving parts, and all those I/Os are unnecessary, I disabled the ThinkVantage HDD APS service. Also, while I had Process Explorer open, I realized I log my IM conversations. I disabled logs since I never actually read them, and they generate a lot if I/Os. Generally, it might be a good idea to pay attention to which programs are generating a lot of read/writes in order to reduce wear on your solid-state drive.

So...what are the results?

-From pressing power to login screen: 27s, 25s, 35s, 23s, 23s
-From hitting "Shut Down" to power off: 3s, 8s, 2s, 3s,
-Time it took to install Firefox: 0s (seriously, it just went to the installation screen and said it was done).
-Changes in battery life: On my 6-cell, I went from around 5.5 hrs to 6.5 hrs with WiFi on and 1/15 brightness. Bluetooth is turned off.
-Idle wattage: I used to use around 7W-9W during idle, and now I've seen idle wattage as low as 5W. 6W idle is much more common though.

Overall, program responsiveness is ridiculous. I don't really wait for anything to load for more than a second or two. I'm thrilled to find the battery life improvement since that was the most disappointing thing about my x201s. Anyway, I feel like I just rambled a lot in this post, but if you have any questions regarding the installation process, I'll happily respond to them. Thanks for reading!

 

Hi criceto,

Thanks for the information.

I've got a x201s and retro installed a Intel X-25m 80Gb SSDSA2M080G2GC , however I'm getting slow 4k reads - I updated the firmware from HA to HD thinking this would help. Using AS Benchmark Alex Intelligent Software - Downloads: AS SSD Benchmark my results are attached.



Would you please run a test and let me know how your figures compare? I'm really interested in the Access Times and the 4k writes.

I did a clean Windows7 64bit install and loaded the drivers afterwards.

Thanks in advance

 

Criceto,

Have you verified that the Rescue & Recovery produced aligned partitions on the SSD? It might not be the case... Could you look it up and keep us posted?

thanks.

 

@riteon: My figures are essentially identical. Please note that another program was accessing the disk at the same time intermittently, but I'm sure that the frequency of access did not confound the results. Results attached.

@Zaroff: Vista installer automatically aligns partitions, so it should come as no surprise that Rescue and Recovery also automatically aligns partitions. Even if Rescue and Recovery did not align partitions, this can be easily accomplished through gparted. My SYSTEM_DRV partition has an offset of 1,048,576 bytes = n, and my C:\ partition has an offset of 1,258,291,200 bytes = m. n%4096 = 0 and m%4096 = 0

 

Only Vista SP2 (install disk) aligns properly. SP1 and RTM you must do it manually (diskpart works great).

 

Thanks for specifying. I didn't mean to provide partial information.

 

Reason I asked was my X200s came preinstalled, with the 3 partitions, with Win 7 Pro 64. They were not aligned, so supposing I wanted to clone my HDD onto a new SSD, I'd be in trouble alignment-wise.

 

Congrats on your SSD I plan on installing one in my X201s too in a couple of days. Am going to buy the SSD and take it over to Lenovo to see if I can get them to help me out with it.

So the best way to do this is to install Windows 7 first and then the drivers after?? Any other special tips to take notice of?? Things not to do or forget?

 

@Zaroff: That's very peculiar. I wonder why yours didn't come aligned...I haven't checked my hard drive to see if it's aligned, but I'd imagine it would be. Either way, I highly recommend using gParted to aligned your partitions (use with caution, however...I recently destroyed my Win7 partition in gParted due to some careless button clicking).

@stylinexpat: Actually, I mentioned that I used Rescue and Recovery which comes with all the drivers preinstalled. If you do a clean install, you can download System Update from the Lenovo site, which will install the drivers for you. Some people suggested saving the LAN or WLAN driver prior to clean installing Win7 just in case Win7 doesn't support the devices by default.

 

Wow, great post! This will definitely be useful when I decided to throw an SSD into my X201.

As for Ubuntu graphics problem, you can try this https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/554569 (post 8).

 

That's strange, mine came aligned. After I created the factory restore discs, I installed the SSD, re-imaged, and it was aligned.

 

I don't know why it came that way, but it definitely did...
Anyway, I sorted my way out of it, sans Gparted.

Robocopy is your friend ;-)

 

I am debating now between getting the Intel 160GB SSD or the new Vertex 2 SSD. How has yours been coming along so far?

I noticed that my X201s lags a bit quite often and I usually get that spinning wheel when I open IE and a few other programs. Not sure if it is just because I have 2GB of RAM or because my SSD in my Macbook Pro has spoiled me.

 

I think the problem is that you're using IE I'm really enjoying my SSD. I found that I boot into Ubuntu quite a bit more frequently than I do into Win7, but the experience has been phenomenal regardless of the OS. Response times and boot times (the latter applies to Ubuntu, especially) have been extraordinary.

 

I recently installed the Intel x25MG2 160GB in my x200s. Boot, shutdown, sleep, and resume are all much improved. Launch times on some apps are better but on others there's not much improvement. Compiling/Running in Visual Studio is a little faster but not a huge improvement.

Here's a concrete example: copying a folder containing 330 files with a total size of 37MB takes about 20 seconds on the Intel X25M.

Overall the Intel SSD is faster, but it's not a night-and-day difference over the 7200rpm drive I had before.

 

Anyone else getting that spinning wheel after they installed their ssd?

 

I ordered a new Vertex 2 SSD for my X201s Can't wait for it to arrive.

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