Dell m1530 (2008) adding ssd drive?

Hi all,

Do you know if it's possible to replace the standard laptop harddrive that came with my Dell m1530 with a Corsair Force Series F240 240 GB SSD drive?

I purchased the m1530 back in 2008 and it's using bios version A12.
I'm running windows 7, 32 bit
3 gb ram on the pc.

I currently have a 295 Gb drive in the laptop but it's been slow lately and running very hot. So I was thinking I could maybe get a few more good years out of the m1530 by changing to SSD.

So have anybody tried this?
- Chr

 

Hello.
That laptop should take any standard 2.5"(inch) SATA Hard Drive, so the F240 should be fine.

 

Yes, it will work. As far as speeds go, it depends on what sata speed is implemented in your controller. If you're running sata I, you won't get anywhere near the full speed of that drive. If you're running sata II you will be a lot closer and will see a big increase in speed on your whole computer. Do you already have the Force, or are you about to buy it? The Force line has been plagued by problems that Corsair has yet to fix. You might want to look at other drives for the time being, as well as checking in on the Corsair forums to see when/if the issues have been resolved.

 

What kind of issues are the Corsair Force drives generally experiencing? (Just my curiosity here as I know some people have reported freezing with the Crucial C300)

 

thanks for the comments.
I haven't purchased a ssd drive yet. I found the Corsair drive from a online benchmark review of drives. Ref: Corsair Force F120 SSD Review | StorageReview.com
It looked like a good option to me, but I will sure be searching to see if what issues users have.
I'm not too technical. How could I check if I have SATA I or SATA II?
Isn't there something about the PC should support AHCI for SSD drives. Do you know if m1530 a12 bios support this?

.... edit
ok from bios AHCI seems to be supported.
In Win7 Device manager I can see this controller, but I'm not sure if this is SATA II:

Intel ich8m SATA AHCI Controller - 2829
Intel ich8m ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 2850

any tips on how to check for SATA II support. And I guess if SATA II is not supported then I could look for a cheaper slower driver?

 

XPS M1530 has PM965 which supports full SATA 2 speeds.

The Corsair drive is good, but you need to ask yourself do you need an SSD that large, and put it into a timebomb?

 

If I remember correctly, there were a lot who reported the drive instantly being unrecognized by the bios, and possible deletion of files. This was on the Corsair forums. I had their 128GB Nova on my L501x, and loved it. Had absolutley no problems whatsover, nor did I see many posts of anyone having problems with that drive. NOTE: Almost all manufacturers have different drives out with different controllers, and some get a bad rep. Sometimes you have to take that with a grain of salt (like the reviews on Newegg sometimes) and sometimes you want to do some more research on the manufacturers forums to check out complaints or problems people may be having. The C300 is honestly one of the fastest and most stable sata III drives on the market. It's bad rep comes from the small percentage of the huge number of owners. Every drive will have this as I said earlier.

 

@Tsunade - you're right that the m1530 will not work forever. I do have a homeserver in my setup where most of my content is stored. On the m1530 I just have 20gb photos, 20gb music and 60gb video files. Looking at the prices of ssd there is not much point in going with 180gb instead of 240gb. The current disk is 320gb and I find it hard to imagine how I could organize myself with a 80 or 120gb ssd. The main problem is that we use the m1530 as a desktop replacement and only have wlan network where we use it. If I always would have easy lan connection available then it would be a different issue and I could load more stuff off to the home server.

I was thinking that I could add the 240gb ssd disk to the m1530 now and then in a few years re-use the 240gb disk in a new system, eg. new homeserver in the basement or 2nd mediacenter pc.

 

Took the plunge and got the corsair ssd. It was easy to add to the XPS m1530 and I then installed Win7 with SP1 from usb stick. 20 min later I have a fresh install ready. I have been using the system for a week and have not had any issues. The PC is faster, around 25sec boot time, more quiet as it does not get as hot as when it had the normal hard drive in it.