Jump to content

Y500 msata upgrade/primary drive


lightrefracted

Recommended Posts

I'm interested in using an Intel 525 msata ssd as a primary drive. I found information on upgrading the cache drive, but nothing on replacing it with a large msata ssd and using it as the primary system drive. I assume the msata drive is treated as a standard drive that can booted to, right? Thanks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I seconded kareldegrote 's opioion. You should see no difference between the msata drive and a regular sata3 drive.

If you want to add a regular sata3 drive then you have to remove the HDD. The Y500 (i5) has a free m-sata slot, which makes it possible to use the m-sata as a primary and the HDD for additional storage.

And what do you mean with; "You should see no difference between the msata drive and a regular sata3 drive."

Difference in what?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm interested in using an Intel 525 msata ssd as a primary drive. I found information on upgrading the cache drive, but nothing on replacing it with a large msata ssd and using it as the primary system drive. I assume the msata drive is treated as a standard drive that can booted to, right? Thanks.

post-10272-14494994347428_thumb.jpg

FYI.

Hi I have done msata upgrade and here is my new msata SSD bechmark result. I averaged 293MB/s in windows 8 without any tweaking yet.

I'm going to do some routine SSD tweaking. Will udpate later.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have a Crucial M4 mSATA SSD for my Y500. Works great, I dropped Win7 on it and am using legacy boot. UEFI was too confusing for me :( Although, I'm sure you can have it setup to use UEFI on the mSATA.

Not sure if it is required, but to be safe and have my bootloader installed properly, I disconnected the HDD while installing Windows onto the SSD.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

Great, this is exactly what i want to do too, plus also dual boot with linux, both on msata

Did you reformat the big sata hdd and remove windows 8? or can you boot into Win8 aswell by changing boot device priority??

I have a Crucial M4 mSATA SSD for my Y500. Works great, I dropped Win7 on it and am using legacy boot. UEFI was too confusing for me :( Although, I'm sure you can have it setup to use UEFI on the mSATA.

Not sure if it is required, but to be safe and have my bootloader installed properly, I disconnected the HDD while installing Windows onto the SSD.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just did this today with a Crucial M4 256 msata. Like previous posters said you have to put the boot option to legacy or you get blue screens (trust me i know). this sucker is so much faster now. Took me an hour to set everything back up to normal. Kept the old hdd unformatted and pull my files and transferred my steam folder afterwards, worked like a charm. Now all my games and big lesser used programs go on 1tb and os and office go on msata. I have only used less than 40GB so far and it is a WORLD of difference in speed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you have a large enough SSD, where you don't mind losing 40GB to backup partitions, it's probably better to just clone your hard drive to the SSD. That way you'll retain your UEFI install, and your two backup partitions, and your one-touch recovery will still function. I wanted to keep my one-touch recovery functional, since I sometimes like to wipe the slate and go with a fresh install from time to time. I deleted only the OS partition, and reinstalled WIndows 8, then installed the drivers and sofware (including the one-touch software), setup a base Windows install to my liking (updates and all), then created a backup using one-touch.

You could use something like this to clone to hdd to ssd. Apricorn SATA Wire Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit ASW-USB-25

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I say go for it. I also have a Crucial M4 256 Gb mSata as my main drive (and only drive) and this thing really screams now. You won't regret it.

I have two prior Intel SSD's but decided to go with the Crucial because it doesn't compress data on the drive. This means that the storage space is 'real' and won't go down if you store a lot of compressed data.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use. We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.