Hello, A few tips, in no particular order:
Make sure you have the latest BIOS for your ThinkPad T61p installed. Likewise, create a bootable CD with the latest firmware for the SSD for installation once that part arrives. SSDs, like recent HDDs, use a native 4KB sector size, as opposed to the 512-byte size used by earlier models. Windows Vista and above natively support this, XP does not (but can be made to support it with some tweaking and some caveats). Support for Windows 7 is well-established on the T61p. I've mostly worked with Windows 8 on newer ThinkPads (X61t, X120e, W510) and the OS works as advertised, but some ThinkVantage-branded software is missing/no longer available. As far as specs go, any standard notebook-sized SATA SSD (2.5" form-factor, 9.5mm high) will fit into the ThinkPad T61p. The SATA interface itself comes in three speeds (150MBps, 300MBps, 600MBps) but the connector is the same for all of them, and a faster drive will just drop back to the slower SATA-I interface speed used by the T61p. A BIOS hack to get it up to SATA-II's 300MBps rate is available, but I have no experience with it. All things being equal, I would suggest getting an SSD with a SATA-III interface for use in a future ThinkPad. Also, SSD's come in both 7mm and 9.5mm drive shells--get one with a 7mm high shell for the same reason. There's no difference in cost, since the SSD is just a circuit board inside the shell, and doing so will allow you to re-use in a notebook that uses the lower-height drive bay without resorting to hardware gymnastics. Last suggestion is to do a clean install of the operating system, as opposed to a cloning an existing drive or reloading it from a disk image. The reason for this is a combination of sector size issues, plus Windows actually installs itself differently on an SSD (unneeded tasks like defragmention are disabled by default). Hope that helps, and enjoy your new SSD! Your T61p will seem like a new machine, especially going from a conventional rotating media HDD. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky At 10:00 AM 1/23/2013, you wrote:
------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2013 14:44:51 -0800 From: "Dan Galender" <[email protected]> Subject: [Thinkpad] Question on Installing an SSD Drive in a T61p To: "ThinkPad Mailing List" <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I'm trying to breathe a little more life into an aging T61p. Has anyone installed an SSD drive as a hard drive replacement and are there any issues I should be aware of (BIOS settings, etc.)? I'm planning on reinstalling Windows from scratch (still trying to decide between 7 and 8). Any pioneers willing to show their battle scars or is it a simple plug and play? Thanks! Best regards, -Dan Galender
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