In my previous article I explained why would you need a RAM upgrade as your needs might dictate the need for more RAM. You can read that article here. In this article I will explain why it is a good idea to upgrade from a traditional hard disk drive (HDD) to a solid state drive (SSD).
Do You Really Need an SSD?
You might have noticed the slow booting speeds on your machine. Or even after the desktop shows up (in case of Windows OS), you notice that the hard drive is being read and the activity light keeps blinking for long periods of time. We all know that noise that hard disks make on random reads. Quiet annoying, right? This happens when you have a lot of startup programs that need to be run each time you boot-up your laptop and the hard drive isn't fast enough to provide all the required data in an instance.
However there are couple of ways to solve this. One way is to type 'msconfig' in the 'RUN menu' or the 'Start Menu' and hit enter. Go to the startup tab and un-check all the programs that you don't want to load on startup. As a rule of thumb, I would leave the programs provided by Microsoft checked as some of those might be builtin windows components.
Another way to go around the problem is to upgrade the hard drive to a faster one or preferably an SSD. Solid State Drives or SSDs are considerably faster than the hard drives and will provide very fast read and write speeds. More than the numbers the overall SSD experience is definitely worth it even though the price per GB factor is not too good for SSDs. Let me tell you, once I upgraded to an SSD in one of my notebooks, ever since I always had an SSD in all of my machines.
What Makes Solid State Drives Fast?
So what makes an SSD so fast? Solid state drives contain flash memory modules that can provide read and write speeds at orders of GB/s. These days the only bottleneck to SSD speeds is the on-board SSD controller itself. Whereas in case of a hard disk, it contains a magnetized metallic disk that rotates at high speeds and a mechanical read/write head moves above the platter to access data. Since mechanical motion is involved, hard disks are naturally very slow.
The SSD Upgrade..!!
Now lets have a look at the SSD upgrade on a Lenovo E430. Once you take the bottom cover off by taking off the three screws that hold the bottom cover in place, you have access to the hard disk drive, RAM slots, CPU and GPU heat-pipes, the fan, CMOS battery, optical drive and the Wi-Fi card. Here I added 4 GB of extra RAM making it a total of 8 GB. Two RAM slots are available. I also replaced the HDD with a Samsung SSD 830 series SSD. Internal 500GB hard drive was put in a HDD caddy that replaced the optical drive. Optical drive was then made into portable USB optical drive using an adapter casing. Later i also upgraded the CPU thermal paste as I was having heating issues with the notebook.
Some comments about the E430 notebook.
Small fan with tiny radiator isn't enough for this notebook. It runs hot all the time even when new. Sometimes it gets hot to an extent that the plastic got swollen on the display by the heat coming from the exhaust when i played games like Battle-field 3, NFS most wanted 2012. But performance was real good although @ 1366x768. Its not possible to connect two displays with this notebook although VGA and HDMI ports are there but only one will work at a a time.
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