Replacing / Upgrading the Hard Drive in a Lenovo U110
Category: Miscellaneous
Author: Walle Lindberg
Principal Consultant
Elysium Solutions LLC
December 8th, 2008
As posted on http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=ideaPad&thread.id=6058How to / howto replace / upgrade Lenovo U110 hard drive with a SSD drive
I decided to just go for it and replace the hard drive in the Lenovo U110. Hard drives in general are seriously the bottleneck of systems nowadays, especially after the introduction of GigE and 10 GigE. Unfortunately 4200RPM drives ship with a lot of laptops, and are pretty much the slowest drives out there; they will make even the fastest systems feel sluggish. Although... the 4200 RPMdrive is this laptop is actually a little bit better than most other 4200's RPM hard drives.
Fortunately, I had a drive laying around (purchased for a HP mini 1000 that I had bought a couple weeks back.) I returned the mini 1000 because of the resolution and a few other limiting factors, and replaced it with this Lenovo. Replacing the drive in the HP mini made a world of difference, and the sluggy feeling of the U110 is also due to the hard drive. How do I know? I have an Asus S101 that boots fast as hell. Same processor/memory/OS as the HP mini. Only difference was the SSD drive. Once I replaced the drive in the HP mini, the boot times were comparable. I was hoping it would do the same for the Lenovo. Reinstalling with XP will help too.
See this article for more on that: http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/lenovo-ideapad-u110-red/4864-3121_7-32981003-3.html
This is the drive I bought: Mtron 32GB SSD with stated output of 100MB/sec (actual is lower... see charts below). Price is about $250 or so. I shopped around... this is probably the cheapest place to get it. http://rocketdisk.com/product_info.php?cPath=15&products_id=83
Pros:
Fast... very fast.
No more grinding noise (as with most hard drives)
Cons:
Obviously the price (probably not an issue if you shelled up the cash for the U110
Size
The drive that comes with the laptop is a Toshiba MK1214GAH 120 GB
My take is this:
If you need performance, you have to make a few sacrifices. For example, if you buy a Ferrari, then you sacrifice back seats. For me, my goals are portability, and fast boot times. I'm using this laptop for 24/7 on call support, so if I want the quickest boot time possible. And I want something smaller and lighter than my Mac Book Pro. The Mac Book Air isn't going to cut it because I use an EVDO express card.
Also, there's a slot for an SD memory card. Just buy a 16GB card for ~$40 and put your documents on there. You should keep home directories/OS on a separate drive or partition anyway.
So on to the replacement... its actually really easy.
Disclaimer: these instructions come with no warranty what so ever. I do not work for Lenovo and there is a possibility you can void your warranty or break your system. Please proceed at your own risk.
First of all. Create an image of your drive. The Lenovo U110 doesn't come with any installation disks. The only thing it has is a separate partition on your drive that lets you restore your disk to the original state as when you bought it. That partition alone takes up 17 GB. The Windows Vista bare install from factory takes up about 15GB. Basically if you replace your HD with a SSD, then you really shouldn't waste your space with that restore partition. What I recommend is using Ghost and taking an image of your regular partition. After that when you need to restore, just restore using Ghost.
Personally, I use a combination of I use Bart PE/ghost to create images. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
1. First, remove the battery, the memory place, and all the drive covers (SD card, Express card)
PIC #1 back of lenovo u110
2. Remove all the screws on the back.
3. Once the 3 screws underneath the battery are removed, you can carefully pop off the front bezel.
PIC #2 pulling off bezel
4. You can now remove the keyboard. It is only held on by double sided tape. No additional screws to remove. I pressed down on the keys and slid it up to loosen it. Once it was loose, I pulled it off and flipped it over. Once you see the connector pull down on the white tabs on both sides at the same time to open the connector.
PIC #3 lenovo u110 keyboard connector
PIC #4 pull tabs down here
5. For here, remove the 6 screws holding on the aluminum piece.
PIC #5 remove these screws
6. Then you can carefully pry off the rest of the bezel. Be careful not to lose the 4 rubber stoppers. One on each side, and 2 on the bottom.
7. Now remove the drive. On the HD drive connector, flip the black lock up, and pull out the connector. The drive has an anti shock rubber sleeve around it. Slip your new drive in, and put the drive back where it was.
PIC #6 hard drive / ZIF connector
The dimensions are almost identical.
PIC #7 drives side by side
8. Put the laptop back together and you're done.
Note:
Once I restored the partition back to my drive, Vista wouldn't boot properly as I was missing a file. I had another Vista disk laying around, popped that baby in, and after the language select, I clicked on repair my installation. After that everything booted fine.
Here are the benchmarks:
HD: 65.9 MB/sec Burst speed, 20 ms seek time,
Sequential: 30MB/sec at 10GB, about 15MB/sec at 120GB
PIC #8 Toshiba 4200RPM drive benchmarks
SSD:
98.0 MB/s burst, .1ms seek time - WOW!
80- 90 MB/sec sequential read speed all the way through- WOW!
PIC #9 Mtron SSD drive Benchmarks in Lenovo u110
The Windows Vista experience rating from the drive went from a 4 to a 5.9. Not even sure what that means, or how Microsoft determines these numbers, but it seems like a significant jump
PIC #10 Vista Experience Index for Lenovo u110 with Mtron SSD drive
Conclusion: After I have the SSD in, from the moment I see the Lenovo start up screen to the moment I see my desktop is about 41 seconds. Im sure it will be even faster with XP. Everything feels faster. The drive light is barely ever on.
Next task is to get this thing working with Linux. I hate Windows. Seems like Linux doesn't like the video card...