New SSD in old laptop? IBM ThinkPad X40 getting faster than ever!

New SSD Vaseky V800 in old laptop IBM ThinkPad X40 with a cheap IDE-mSATA adapter? Review & tutorial. The X40/X41 needs a 3.3V adapter (not 5V).

Music: Clean Break

[danimationstips]

Nice to see one of these adaptors in action, and I'm not surprised that its performance was limited by the older hardware in the laptop. Still, a massive improvement! Well done for keeping this computer working and out of landfill!

[mtssvnsn]

Around 2002 I put a "cheap" second hand 1.2 Gig ATA-flash card in my laptop instead of a hard-drive.
It took quite a bit of work to shave down WinXP to fit into 1 Gig, but it worked.
Booted in about 4 seconds =)

[ramakrishnamishra]

Please let us know about long term reliability now that 5 years have passed

[PanicAcid]

No way you plugged that in so easily first time, just trying to do this now and lining those pins up is a nightmare! shame nobody has designed a 3d printable adaptor for these.

[gnuPirate]

This was beautiful and a perfect guide.
Thank you so much, good sir. I now have a way to bring my T40 units into the future (:

[annekedebruyn]

If you ditch windows for a very light distro it would actually still be a great porn computer.

[farooqishaq]

Difference of night and day...while memory and cpu got very fast..HDD remained a bottle neck on how fast data could be fetched.

[Tartneznok]

Recently did the same thing to my old T40 that I got for free. It runs great now on Lubuntu and Windows XP, but it's not good for any real use anymore besides putting it into my glass cabinet and turning it on to show off whenever a visitor asks me about it.
The later 4:3 models like the T61 and X61 however are still great for daily use if you install a Linux distro onto it.

[hllwmn]

Yes, this worked on my vintage Dell laptop (2003). I used Acronis to image the orig. HDD. onto the new Vaskey SSD.

[Subgunman]

There are some factors one must consider when using SSD's in an older Win 98 or 95 laptop. It is the way the partitions are set up on the drive. This can lead to constant write and rewrite cycles drastically reducing the life of the memory cells in the SSD. THERE ARE videos out there that address this issue and to see if your drive has been properly setup to correct this issue.

[StaticVapour]

Great thing to see that it's this easy. Gotta get X41 just for giggles

[hafo]

this is a great laptop for linux, i´ve got two of them

[WhittyPics]

An SSD will speed up an old machine but they have their limitations. I put one in my wife's 2009 iMac last summer and the drive is getting half the performance it is getting in my 2013 iMac. The same drive that is getting over 500 MBps in my 2013 iMac is getting around 250 MBps in that 2009 iMac. Still miles faster than the old spinning 5400 hard drive.

[paul]

Nice vid, just ordered a SSD for a T60, I'm quite curious about improved performance... :-)
To accellerate your T40 even more, install a minimalistic Linux of choice on top of Windows, with a CPU imprint of roundabout 200Mb, sufficient for everyday working tasks and surfing, but usually much faster compared to XP, Vista, Win7 and 8. MS-Windows is still there if you need to run some special .exe files. Works fine, I use Zorin Core (gratis) easy for installing dualboot via GRUB. Greetings from Norway.

[resaterel]

Great upgrade video, this is what I call engineering.

[BesideTheVoid]

0:41 what are you actually comparing here? Is the chip not present from the factory? What is the advantage of adding the component?

[eduardoavila]

It's a shame that where i live, the X lineup, and actually every thinkpad are really expensive to the point that with a c2d one and even a Pentium M one, i can buy a sandybridge i3. :/

[Up_All_Night]

Nice. I know what's going in my T23 next.

[Semseddin.]

I upgraded my ThinkPad X41 's hdd with samsung PM830 32gb msata ssd with the very same adapter. It is absolutely day and night difference compared to stock noisy hdd ibm put in these machines. I took the approach of removing the palmrest and connecting the adapter. It was recognized with the first try. Installed win7 32bit but the performance was just bad. Anything beyond xp sp3 for these machines ruin the experience in my opinion. Nice video PAAC !

[MrDarkknight]

To make old laptop better than new...amazing. Ty