Thinkpad Hard Drive Upgrade
When I bought my Thinkpad off Ebay about 3 or 4 years ago, I was quite happy to receive my first laptop. My A21m model has been rock solid for all these years but inevitablly, over time, any hardware begins to show its age. It’s original specs were P3 – 750, 256mb sdram, 20gb hard drive, 15″ screen. Laptops are not very upgradeable, but there are a few things you can do to enhance performance. I ended up adding anothef stick of ram to take it to its highest capacity of 512mb about 2 years ago. Since then I have no made any other changes other than using wireless on it. I am currently using this product and driver for ENPWI-G and you will notice that it announces that “This device does not support Linux” which is quite interesting because apparently I have really screwed something up because I am writing this post using Linux with that card and have been enjoying a nice wireless connection from this laptop using this driver. I found that the CVS driver for my rt2500 worked the best. Of course this means that you will need to know how to undergo the menial task of compiling a driver.
Anyway, back to the hard drive. I managed to pick up a brand new Samsung 100GB drive at 5400rpm for $120 Canadian. This was a reasonable price. This upgrade was justifiable for a few reasons: 1 – it was a huge upgrade in a space going from a 20 to a 100 which meant that I could put a lot more of my music on it and assorted files and not worry about running out of space, 2- it would enable a more reasonable opportunity to multiboot on this portable device, 3 – a speed increase in the sense that my previous drive was only spinning at 4200 rpm. It has worked out great overall and I would recommend it to anyone wanting more space. The hard drives are universal so as long as you get sata or pata that is compatible with your laptop, then the rest is easy. My hard drive was very easy to remove and replace. Although I did end up reinstalling Linux, it was very easy to backup my original data across the network and then copy it back after the reinstall. I do notice a difference in speed.
For my leftover 20GB previous drive, I went out and picked up a 2.5″ external casing which is very small and can fit into most jacket pockets. This was around $20 Canadian. Now I can use this drive as a portable device if I like. When I decide to get a new laptop, I can also transfer this 100GB to it down the road if I want so the investment is something that can be relatively long lasting.