Replace the HDD in my old laptop with an SSD?

[dscudella]

Good morning TH.

A friend of mine just upgraded the SSD's in his desktop and sold me his old ones (I literally know NOTHING about SSD's). I figured I'd put one in my desktop as a boot drive and for my most played games and put the other in my laptop. Then I started questioning myself if this was even possible with a laptop as old as mine. So I'm turning to our community.

SSD: OCZ Agility 3 120gb SATA3

Laptop: HP Compaq 8510P (nothing amazing but good enough)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2ghz
RAM: 2gb (1x1gb Dual Channel) DDR2 (I would upgrade to 4gb but DDR2 is almost 3x the cost of DDR3)
GPU: ATI HD 2600 256mb
HDD: 120gb 5400RPM
OS: Win 7 Home Premium 64-bit

My desktop is for gaming & photo editing. My laptop is used for everything else (internet, videos, email, downloading and uploading forms for work).

 

[dingo07]

If the HDD in your laptop is a SATA drive, then you will have no issues putting in an SSD. Remember to remove your HDD from the desktop before installing windows to the SSD.

 

[pfunkmd]

I would go ahead and try the ssd in the laptop and see how it works I imagine that it would make a huge difference.

I have the same question my hdd went bad in an old laptop of mine and I was wondering how much of a performance upgrade will it be if I install a ssd rather then a hdd. I have a ssd in my gaming pc and it makes a world of difference would it be the same in a Toshiba Satellite A215? I do not use the laptop for storage so I don't need a big drive is it worth it? And to the OP if you try it in the laptop can you let me know how it turns out.
PS. sorry I did not want to start a new thread for almost exactly the same question.

 

[geofelt]

Most likely, you can install the ssd.

Your laptop is modern enough that it should have sata components.

Laptop drives come in two heights 9mm and 7mm
Your laptop hard drive is is the 9mm size which is good, the same as the ssd.
Clone your laptop hard drive to the ssd.
You can attach the ssd via an external enclosure, or, install both in a desktop to do the cloning.
Acronis true image is just one utility that ccan do the job.
Then remove the laptop hard drive and replace with the ssd.
You will be amazed by the difference in performance.

 

[dscudella]

Good insight guys, thank you. I'll just pull the HDD from the laptop and use the SSD with a fresh win 7 install (not worried about cloning). I'm imagining the performance boost will be substantial.

On my Desktop I'll just do the same thing. Pull the HDD out, plug the SSD into my 1 SATA 6gb/s connection, complete a fresh install then plug the HDD and DVDRW into 2 of my 3 SATA 3gb/s connections. I also just replaced my i3-2100 with an i5-3470 in the desktop, so I think I'll be really happy.

 

[dscudella]

UPDATE

I pulled out the old 120gb MSATA HDD and replaced it with the 120gb OCZ Agility 3, reinstalled Win 7 Home Premium 64-bit and all the laptop specific drivers and I have to say that I wish I could update the rest of my laptop.

My Windows boot time went from 31 seconds (from BIOS screen) to 8 seconds and programs load in half the time. Great investment.

The only thing that didn't take was the HP 3D Drive Guard. It stated I had an "Unknown Device" and wouldn't install. No big deal really as it hasn't effected performance or functionality in any way.

 

[maarkr]

I made an image of my older laptop 120Gb drive, swapped to a SSD, then upgraded to Win 8. Lovin it now.

 

[dscudella]

Best answer selected by dscudella.