How to add an ssd drive?

[Brian Cluff]

If you just want to outright replace the existing drive, it super easy, 
just get a SATA SSD and the drive pops out the left side of the machine 
with just one screw.
If you would like to keep the 500Gig drive and use it for bulk storage 
as well as a smaller SSD for the system it is only slightly harder.
It also requires the removal of 1 screw.  Just take out the screw from 
the plate on the bottom and it will snap out.  Then there is a slot next 
to the RAM that the mSATA drive clicks into.  Just make sure that you 
move the antenna wires out of the way before you put the bottom plate 
back on and you are done.  I recommend using a piece of tape to hold the 
antenna wires in place.  If you find that there is a card in there 
already, it is probably a mobile Internet card which my guess is that 
you will probably not be using.  Just pull the antenna wires off it and 
remove it.

The T420 can hold a total of 4 hard drive.  1 SATA in the HD slot. 1 
mSATA, 1 regular SATA in the DVD drive bay, that requires the purchase 
of a tray, and 1 SSD in the express card slot.  Technically you could 
count a large SD card as a 5th drive if you really wanted.  Pretty good 
expandability for such a small computer.

Brian Cluff

On 10/06/2015 05:34 PM, joe at actionline.com wrote:
> Brian Cluff last wrote:
>> You'll enjoy that Laptop a lot. I just picked up a T420 myself
>> a few weeks ago and everything works perfect right out of the box.
>> I did add 8 gigs of ram for a total of 12 and installed a 240Gig
>> mSATA SSD ... an addition to the 320 Gig spinning drive that
>> I put /home on, and that made a huge difference in the speed
>> of all the apps loading.
> How difficult is it to add an SSD?
>
> I really don't need the 500-gig HD that is in this T420
> that I just bought. On my old net-top system, df shows this:
> Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda5       15307020  6231552   8307468  43% /
> udev             1020708        4   1020704   1% /dev
> tmpfs             412276     1060    411216   1% /run
> none                5120        0      5120   0% /run/lock
> none             1030680    21072   1009608   3% /run/shm
> /dev/sda6       71559236 26600696  41374540  40% /home
>
> Instead of flushing the 500-gig HD, could I just install
> a 64-gig or 128-gig SSD and install Linux on that and leave
> the 500-gig unused? I don't need to bother with dual boot.
>
> I looked on Amazon and saw these:
>
> Transcend 64GB SATA III 6Gb/s MSA370 mSATA Solid State Drive
> (TS64GMSA370) by Transcend $39.99 Prime
>
> MyDigitalSSD 128GB 50mm Bullet Proof 4 BP4 50mm mSATA
> Solid State Drive SSD SATA III 6G - MDMS-BP4-120
> by MyDigitalSSD $55.00 Prime or $44.95 used (3 offers)
>
> Also, what is the best way to install Linux Mint 17.2?
>
> I downloaded linuxmint-17.2-mate-32bit.iso but the size
> is 1,572,864,000 so I can't burn that onto a dvd to
> install it.
>
>
>
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