M11x Upgrade Questions

Looking to upgrade the hard drive on my M11x to an SSD. This question might sound dumb, sounds dumb to me, but, what about the connectors on the hard drive connecting it to the motherboard, are they all standard now, or is there some kind f adapter you need? I noticed on my hard drive that there's a little adapter you can pull out.

Now, what hard drive should I buy? I've been looking into the Intel-X25 (or am I thinking of the wrong one?...) SSD, read it's one of the most energy efficient. So, some suggestions for SSDs would be great. Do hard drive typically come with a data transfer kit, or do I need to buy my own?

Once I finish installing the new SSD, is it possible to completely erase the everything on the old hard drive, and clone the new one onto that, and use that old one as a back up boot drive?

Also, what form factor do I need to look for? And, I was looking at the prices for 120GB and 160Gb drives, and the price difference is immense! Why for such a small change?

 

the adapter is inside the laptop itself

when you remove the HDD, there will be a little adapter on the plug of the laptop (normally where SATA or IDE will be)

all SSD's are 2.5" at max so they will fit the adapter which screws into the HDD caddy, which just sticks right in. If it screws in properly then it will be in

 

A few things...

1) Pretty much any SSD will fit unless you go for the super large $1000+ 1 TB SSDs on New Egg. You mentioned you won't be so everything should be fine.

2) Intel is pretty good but I've found better speeds with the OCZ brand.

3) You will need to buy a hard drive cloning bay separately to transfer and clone your current hard drive. However I recommend backing up everything essential (music, apps, documents) and doing a fresh install on your SSD. You'll find much better speeds.

4) The m11x doesn't have room for two HD's. Though you might be able to turn it into an external HDD with a usb plug if you want. Not sure on the specifics of that but it's most likely a little expensive.

5) The reason for it being so expensive is that it's a relatively new technology. However it's coming down fast and sizes are increasing every day. Wait until February to get one as there's a new controller coming out that will bring down costs drastically.

 

I'm not too concerned about SSD speed, as long as it's faster than the Western Digital 7,200 RPM in my laptop. My real intent is to get better battery life, so I'm willing to sacrifice some speed for better battery life.

I wasn't talking about a second HD sitting in my laptop, but rather a back up boot drive I can store away in case something drastic were to happen. I read that the retail Intel SSDs come with a data migration kit, so could that be reused?

How do I do a fresh install on a hard drive? And can I get the Alienware firmware and things like Command Center, Intel HD Graphics option, Nivida Control Panel, (the programs that came with my laptop)?

Getting an SSD isn't urgent for me, but I am certainly interested in getting an SSD upgrade, so waiting is absolutely no problem.

 

It'll be so much faster no matter what. And do that come witha data migration kit? Didn't know that. Just make sure they really do.

If you have an external DVD drive you can use that. If not you can either use an 8 GB USB stick or an external hard drive. You'll want to copy Windows 7 from the DVD onto that and press F10 to choose your boot drive when starting it up.

All the other stuff you can get online, like drivers and what not.

 

Is it possible to upgrade the wireless networking card on the M11x? Also, can anyone point me to a guide of some sort on how to do a clean install with a new hard drive?