Upgrading my ThinkPad X230 from HDD to SSD (with benchmarks)

In this blog post I will describe how I upgraded my Lenovo ThinkPad X230 machine from the preinstalled HGST 320 GB hard disk drive to an Intel X25-M G2 120 GB SSD. Using a hard disk drive is a slow experience. I can work with my laptop, but compared to my desktop system and other laptops which are equipped with SSDs, everything is painfully slow. Because I have an old SSD lying around unused, I decided to upgrade my machine.

The original hard disk drive is a HGST HTS725032A7E630 drive with 7200 rpm and 320GB. It is replaced by an Intel X25-M G2 Postville 120 GB SSD.

The Intel SSD is about five years old and a bit slow compared to todays standards. It writes with about 100MB/sec and reads with about 250MB/sec, but that is much faster than the original drive in the laptop and makes a huge difference in the user experience. The Intel SSD proved to be extremely reliable over the years so I did not have the need to invest any money to speed up my X230.The X230 only supports SATA 3Gb/s so a fast current SSD which saturates SATA 6Gb/s would be a waste of money for this machine.

I will lose lots of storage capacity by switching from the 320 GB HDD to the 120 GB SSD, but the performance increase is worth it!

I will do a clean install because I want to have a fresh and clean system!

Step 1 – remove the old hard disk drive

To remove the old drive you just have to unscrew to screw marked with the red rectangle in the photo below:

After removing the screw and the little plastic cover under the screw you can pull out a latch from the lower side of the drive:

I pulled out the drive which is contained in a drive cage by pulling the latch:

Then I removed the two rubber spacers at the sides of the hdd cage, removed four screws and had everything separated from each other:

Step 2 – Preparing and inserting the SSD into the laptop

I had a problem with my Intl X25-M SSD: the X230 only allows drives with a thickness of 7 mm and my Intel X25-M SSD had a thickness of 9.5 mm and did not fit in!

After a bit of thinking I figured out that the Intel SSD originally is 7 mm thick but it came with a black spacer on top which I could remove by unscrewing four screws:

After this procedure I was able mount the SSD into the drive cage, apply the two rubber spacers and put everything back into the laptop!

Step 3 – Install Windows 7

Then I installed Windows 7 Professional 64 bit and used the Windows 7 key that I found hidden under the X230s battery.

I installed the Ethernet/LAN driver to get access to my home network, then installed Lenovo System Update 5 which automatically recognized all missing drivers for my machine and downloaded and installed them. After my first reboot the machine showed a blue screen, and did so after each reboot, I was panicking because I could not boot windows. I had to let windows reset the system to an earlier restore point after which I lost all my freshly installed drivers!

The blue screen showed the following error-code:
STOP 0x00000067B (0xFFFFF880009A97E8, 0xFFFFFFFFC0000034, 0x000000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000)

After researching for a while and testing different things I found in different forums, I found out the the problem was the AHCI driver that the Lenovo System Update offered me for installation. I skipped this driver in the Lenovo System Update and kept the original Microsoft AHCI driver and now everything is working flawlessly, finally!
Luckily it is possible to hide specific updates in the Lenovo System Update so that you do not accidentally activate them at a later point in time.

Step 4 – Benchmarks

I used AS SSD for the benchmarks, here is the original HGST hard disk with 320 GB:

Next are the results of the 120 GB Intel X25-M G2 Postville SSD:

The system is fast and snappy now and a joy to use, the operation was successful and I hope my blog post is of use to anyone facing the same problems!