Swapping SSD in place of HDD as primary drive in w510

I was hunting around for a good complete description of how to swap an SSD into my new w510 and use it as the primary disk. I found the information in bits and pieces, so I thought it might be useful to others if I write it all down in one place.

As background, I have a Thinkpad w510 (CoRe i7-820), FHD non-touch screen, Windows 7 64-bit, 8GB of RAM.

I purchased the system with a 512GB hard drive. Then as separate accessories I purchased:
433820U Thinkpad Mini Dock Plus Series 3 for Mobile Workstations
43N3417 Thinkpad 256GB FDE Solid State Drive
43N3412 Thinkpad SATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter III
43N3264 Lenovo USB DVD Burner

For the following procedure you'll also need 1 CD-R disk, 2 DVD-R disks, and a small Philips screwdriver.

You can skip much of the following if you can get by with the small SSD that Lenovo offers pre-installed. I use a lot of engineering software, some of it quite database-bound (e.g. PowerBuilder architecture), that can benefit a lot from an SSD, so I actually have a use for all that space. I think SSDs are still a niche market at current prices, but these instructions are for people who have a specific need for a large SSD.

If you're planning to swap out the HDD for a SSD from the very start, then when you first receive your w510 you should just do the minimum Windows 7 setup necessary to get the system working (such as setting the time), and skip the installation of antivirus, network connections, software, etc. This is because you'll just have to do all that stuff all over again after you swap the drives. If you use the computer for very long, the activation program for your antivirus program might pop up to ask you to activate. You should decline, assuming you are not connected to the Internet.

Here are the steps:

1. The one thing you have to do before removing the factory-installed hard drive, is create recovery disks. Start menu -> Lenovo ThinkVantage Tools -> Factory Recovery Disks, and follow the instructions. Use a CD for the boot disk and 2 DVDs for the data disks.

2. Unplug your w510, turn it over, and remove the battery. Loosen but don't remove the hard drive cover screw until you can unsnap and remove the cover. Remove the hard drive. Although the method for doing this is pretty easy, you might feel more comfortable if you see pictures. You can find them in the w510 Hardware Maintenance Manual, which you can get here:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-74250.

3. Place the SSD, still inside the "storage converter" that it ships with, into the bay where you removed the hard drive. Snap the cover in place and tighten the screw holding it in.

4. Reinstall the battery, turn the computer over, plug it in, open the lid, and press the power button. The computer will fail to start, and will show you a screen where you can select the boot device.

5. Place the boot CD that you made in step 1, into the CD/DVD drive, which should still be in the Ultrabay. On the boot device selection screen, choose the CD/DVD drive. (For me, it was the second item on the list. Not sure if it's always that way.)

6. The computer will boot from the CD, ask you to accept the EULA, then ask you to insert the Data DVD #1 ("Product Recovery Disk 1"). Remove the boot CD, insert the first data DVD, and click Yes. After a few minutes it will ask you to insert the second data DVD. Do that and click Yes. When finished, it will ask you to remove the recovery media, then it will reboot from your new SSD.

7. At this point it starts through the same Windows Setup routine that it did when you first took your w510 out of the box. So now you can go ahead and connect to your network and do a complete setup.

8. Be sure to run Windows Update. I found this part of the process to be amazingly fast. Even the application of service packs to Office 2007 was extremely fast.

Here is something I thought was interesting and unexpected. I purchased my w510 pre-installed with Symantec Norton Internet Security, Microsoft Office Professional, and Microsoft OneNote. All of these (and everything else in the SWTOOLS folder) were included on the recovery disks that the Lenovo utility created in step 1. So I was able to activate and make full use of these programs without having to open the Office disks that shipped with the system. So it's really true that the recovery disks restore the system to its exact state when shipped, including the pre-installed software that you purchased.

You'll also find that Adobe Reader, Corel Burn.Now, Corel DVD Movie Factory, Intervideo WinDVD, Microsoft Research AutoCollage, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (runtime), and Windows Live are installed by the recovery disks just as they came from the factory. So you'll have to uninstall these if you don't want them.

Here is something that made me smile. I timed the startup process, beginning when I pressed the power button from a shut-down state, to the point when Symantec Internet Security finished initializing, the wireless network connection was available, and the desktop was usable. This includes typing my login password, with all my pre-installed software installed but no other software yet. The time: 61 seconds. This SSD drive, plus the Lenovo Windows 7 Enhanced Experience, really rocks! Shutdown time, from clicking the Shutdown button until all the LEDs were off, was 10 seconds.

Next procedure is to install the hard disk drive, which you removed from your w510, into the ultrabay:

1. Shut down your w510, close the lid, unplug it, turn it over, and remove the battery. (You probably don't really have to remove the battery, but I'm just following the instructions in the hardware maintenance manual.)

2. Eject the CD/DVD drive from the Ultrabay.

3. Pick up the hard disk drive you removed earlier, remove the rubber rails, open the plastic retainer clip on the SATA hard drive bay adapter III, plug the hard drive into the adapter, secure the retainer clip, then slide the adapter into the Ultrabay.

The adapter fits very loosely. Apparently this is intentional, but may be disconcerting. It's very loose because the only adapter available to-date is the "slim" version, which is a few mm smaller than the regular ultrabay size. I would like it if Lenovo comes out with a regular size adapter soon, so the hard drive doesn't rattle around in its enclosure. I suppose if it makes you nervous you can apply a piece of electrical tape to prevent rattling, but obviously that's not a great solution.

If you want, you can format and re-partition the hard disk drive that is now in your ultrabay. Mine is a 512GB drive, of which 419GB is free. I think I'll just leave everything on there and not re-format, until I find myself running out of space and needing to make use of the space taken up by the copy of Windows 7, the recovery partition, etc. This way if something goes wrong with my SSD, I can always boot from the HDD.

Another sub-optimal aspect of the w510 accessories is that the mini-dock doesn't have a bay for the DVD burner to slide into. Possibly you can buy an enclosure that will let you use the old DVD burner (which you took out of the Ultrabay). But for convenience sake I just bought a new DVD burner that connects via USB. I'll use that for the rest of the day to install all my software.

Incidentally, the 43N3264 Lenovo USB DVD Burner requires 2 USB ports and does not have an AC adapter. There are other types that you can buy (that only need one USB port) if you prefer.

Windows 7 automatically disables ReadyBoost when you boot from an SSD. It sets ReadyDrive, SuperFetch, and Defrag scheduling based on all of your drives, so these things might be active if you have a HDD in your Ultrabay as I described above. So it's best not to mess with these features as they are already optimized. I have indexing turned on for the SSD since I like the Windows 7 search feature.

In Control Panel -> Power Options -> Advanced Settings -> Wireless adapter settings -> Power saving mode, I suggest using "Maximum performance" so the system doesn't unexpectedly power down your wireless connection to save energy. I prefer doing that manually.

Even though the SSD is full-disk-encrypted, there was no additional setup that I had to do, related to the encryption. The default settings make the encryption transparent, so you don't even know it's there.

The whole process of swapping the drives took about an hour that I wouldn't otherwise be spending in setting up my system. So it's really not difficult at all.

If I think of anything else I'll edit this post to add it.

 

Is the ultrabay hard drive adaptor 12.7mm or 9.5??? In other words, is a small gap present after it is inserted?

Can you tell if the ultrabay is Sata 1.5 or 3.0?

Thanks,

I haven't received my adaptor, yet.

 

The adapter is 9.5 but the bay is 12.7. That's why there's a gap. It's SATA 3.0 according to the Tabook.

 

This is great, thank you. Can anyone who has swapped out for a non-Lenovo SSD comment if the process is different at all for installing drivers, etc.

 

@JarodL: You can follow the same procedure regardless of the SSD vendor.

 

pdth: I've already posted my question in a reply to your post in the other thread, but it might have gone unnoticed. I'm considering buying the same SSD from Lenovo and I don't seem to be able to find any thorough information concerning the drive. Would you be so nice and could you do some benchmarks (like ATTO Disk Benchmark or Crystal Disk Mark) with your new SSD? Also could you please post, who is the manufacturer of the drive and its model number. Thank you.

 

The Ultrabay appears to be a SATA passthrough with some power management, so whatever speed drive you use is what the Lenovo will see. I'll post pictures of the guts if requested.

I'm planning on running my W510 with 2x OCZ Vertex Turbo drives in RAID 0, one internal, one in the Ultrabay. I'm not 100% sure this will work, but I'm going to try.

To make life simple, I'm going to image the Lenovo OS build and redeploy to the new drives. Not sure if I'll need to sysprep it before the copy, however. The RAID vs non-RAID driver might cause some trouble. It is managable tho. I've done this type of swap many times with Ghost.