Hi all.
Not a discussion as such, but a post to help others out who may be thinking of upgrading the HDD in their N5110 to an SSD.
My original system details
- Inspiron N5110
- i5-2410M 2.30GHz
- 8GB RAM (upgraded from 4GB)
- Nvidia GeForce GT 520M
- 500GB 5200rpm HDD
How I went about it
I decided to buy a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO to replace the standard hdd. The drive arrived with a CD containing the Samsung migration tool and Samsung Magician. I also bought a eSATA cable to do the data migration.
I conected the new drive to the eSATA port and tried to use the migration tool. I had to transfer 370GB from the old disk to the new, after 2 hours, the tool reported that it would take a further 8 hours to complete the migration! I gave up on that, and followed the instructions here using Clonezilla. The whole migration then took only 1.5 hours. I ignored the tweaks at the bottom, the Samsung Magician software takes care of that for you.
Once the drive cloning was complete, I followed this YouTube video to disassemble the laptop, and replace the HDD with the new SSD. Once reassembled he laptop booted flawlessly :)
The original drive is SATA2 (3GB/s), but the motherboard supports SATA3 (6GB/s) so you will get the best performance out of the new SSD. Bear in mind, that both the connector for the DVD drive and the eSATA connector only support SATA2 (and I think the DVD connector does not support AHCI either) so you must install the drive internally in the original slot to get the maximum performance.
Once the laptop booted, I ran the Samsung Magician software. I enabled rapid mode, and set OS Optimization to 'Maximum performance'. I ran a benchmark before and after. I think you can see from the image below what a huge difference it has made!
If anyone has any questions about doing this, I'd be happy to help out if I can. Thanks!
