I have an old Dell XPS M1530 laptop that was given to me. It was originally running Windows Vista and I upgraded to Windows 10 to test something but, since Microsoft killed the loophole to use a Windows 7 product key, I installed Linux Mint. The thing actually runs quite well with Linux and I will keep the thing.

My question is that it comes with a 500GB SATA spin drive. The system will never need that much space as, for the most part, I will just install GIMP (graphics editor) and Libre Office. Of course there will be other odds and ends but not a lot. The thing is that, since I did some drive updates on my main, I happen to have a SanDisk 240GB SATA SSD. For the intent of this system 240GB should be more than enough. It looks like a pretty easy drive swap but, of course, I'll need to do a clean install as I'm not about to go through making an image to an external that would likely take longer than an install.

Last time I bench marked the 240GB drive I was getting read rates of ~550MB/sec.. Think I'll see any performance difference with the quicker drive? I think any difference will be pretty minor but I have no other use for the SSD and it would give me another 500GB external drive...

LOL! This will likely be done before there is a response but I'd still like opinions.

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I have always found that upgrading to a ssd in a laptop makes is run noticeably faster.

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I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.

William A. Gustafson
I know I have forgotten more than I can ever hope to remember.

Thanks Bill.

Drive is already swapped and Linux Mint installed. Now doing updates. I'm not getting wireless yet but that is a driver issue I seem to remember from the first setup. Since my main is already on its side on the floor I just pulled the wire from the main to use on the laptop for updates. With the wire removed from my main it just drops down to wireless so it is still on-line.

LOL! When I first put in the SSD it wasn't seen. Sort of an odd setup on this Dell as the drive is swapped via a slot on the base, not opening a port cover. With this setup I could not actually see the SATA connections doe the drive port. The thing is that an SSD is thinner than a spin drive so when inserted the connections didn't line up correctly. I just had to fiddle around when inserting the drive until I felt some resistance when putting in. The resistance was the connections setting. After I figured that out all went fine.

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System done and up to date. I will say that for normal operation Linux Mint isn't all that different than Windows but doing updates, especially for the OS, is much more cumbersome.

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Ne PCIe X16 interface card showed up and all is good.

I'm still using the PCIe X1 card for a 1TB M.2 drive that will be my data drive. Compared to the others it is slow but faster than the spin drive. Copying everything over as I type.

Here are the sequential read rates:
1TB drive in Gen3 M.2 slot -- 3231 MB/sec -- system
1TB drive on X16 interface card -- 3073 MB/sec -- clone
1TB drive in X1 interface card -- 389 MB/sec -- data
500 GB drive in Gen2 M.2 slot -- 1335 MB/sec -- Video conversions

After the file copy from the old data drive to the new is done I'll wipe the old data/system image drive to being strictly for images. It is a 4TB drive.

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