Following my success in Replacing a hard disk I decided to do the same for a Lenovo ThinkPad X130e, which I had purchased for about $250 (again) from Micro Center. The BIOS on this system dates from 2011, not quite as ancient as the Optiplex I had modified before. This replacement was somewhat more risky, since I had installed Linux on it in addition to the Windows 10 home edition it came with. Would the GRUB dual boot system survive the cloning process? I also used a 512GB SSD to replace the 320GB hard drive, hoping to install an additional Linux distribution or two.

For the Optiplex I had simply assumed that the disk partition was MBR rather than GPT, but this time I decided to check. Know How to Check If Partition is MBR or GPT in Windows 10, 8, 7 showed me how to find out. It turned out to be MBR again. It may be a while before GPT systems drop to my price range.

Again Macrium Reflect Free let me clone the hard drive to the SSD without any trouble.

The most frustrating part of the process was physically installing the SSD in place of the hard drive. I have changed parts on desktop systems many times over the years, but this was the first time I had opened up a laptop. Laptop screws are small and I managed to drop and lose some of them. Two different small metric screw sizes had been used. Fortunately, I was to buy a box of replacement laptop screws at Micro Center.

Once again, when the hardware work was done, the GRUB boot menu came up when I turned it on again, just like with the old hard disk. I was able to boot successfully into Windows and then into Linux. Afterwards I rebooted with my Linux tools USB stick and used GParted to add new partitions to take advantage of the increased space.

As with the Optiplex Looking through my records I found I had run the ChrisPC Win Experience Index on this system with the old hard drive. On a 10 point scale the Primary hard drive index was also 5.9 on the Thinkpad. I reran it with the SSD and got a score of 7.75. As I noted before I don’t know how good this index is, but again it looks like the SSD really helps.