A few questions before I dive in....

[Okole]

Hi, I've got a yr old Toshiba P770 I7 that came with a Momentus 500 and I'm planning to move the Momentus to the 2nd bay and buy an SSD for the first bay.

1st I have a concern that the back of an SSD has connections that I'm not used to. The last 2.5 hard disk I played with is in my 9yr old (dead) Toshiba; it is a Travelstar 60 gig from Hitachi and looks more like a tiny IDE. So, is the back of the Momentus like that and I'll just naturally find the right connectors waiting for the SSD when I go to swap this? I'm guessing that these connectors are SATA.

2nd I've seen SSDs that come with a file tranfer cable which someone said was worthless and I think that may well be true. Here is my thoughts of what this process would be according my experience and to what I've read here on the forum:

1) stick the new SSD into the 2nd bay and boot up and let windows see the new hardware and install the drivers for it and then use windows to set up the SSD with 1 partition as a primary boot partition and format it.
2) shut down and swap the drives and boot up on my Acronis Home 12 boot cd and tell Acronis to restore my current boot partition onto the SSD and sit back and watch a bit of TV (I'm old so maybe some Mayberry or Mash) and reboot via the SSD when finished and that'll be it.

According to what I've read here I'll have 2-3 days of jitters and maybe some outright crashing then it'll settle down and be nice and fast.

Oh, I'm guessing the SSD will come with a SATA cable to hook up with?

Please let me know if there is anything else.

Thanks much

 

[StarTech]

Have you looked at the connectors in the drive currently in the Toshiba? That is the first thing to do, or look at the specs or manual and determine that the drives it takes are SATA, and not PATA. My thinking is that if it is one year old it will be SATA, which is what you want. The large majority of existing SSDs have SATA interface.

About the process of moving to / installing the SSD, there are plenty of posts around. You have two valid options, one fresh install of windows (pain: reinstall all your programs), and the other the clone direction (pain: make sure partition is properly aligned, may require shifting partition). Either way will work. I have used both methods at different times. For the first one, you can use the Toshiba recovery disks which you must have created time back. For the second, you must use current level utilities so they are aware of partition alignment. In my case about two years ago, I cloned/resized my C:, which was miss aligned, using a clonezilla backup/restore and then shifted the whole partition, I believe with Gparted.

It is best to set your drive controller to AHCI. Mounting the SSD in D: will do nothing for you in terms of drivers.

 

[Okole]

Wow, wow-wow-wow. Well I just voided my warrenty (only 3 weeks left) and opened it up. The existing drive has connections that look exactly like he SSD's connections that was SATA so that is what I have.

But......Just for the heck I pulled the cover off of the 2nd drive bay and was just blown away. They didn't install any connections for a 2nd drive; it is just an empty bay. How can they possibly be so cheap? This is a Toshiba I7, 8 gigs of ram, 1 gig of Nvidia, 1600x900 screen that I bought direct from Toshiba and they do this to me. Oh boy, I gotta let this settle in......

 

[Zap]

Since the notebook is fairly new and with Windows 7, it will use SATA drives and you can treat a SATA SSD just like a SATA HDD. Nothing "special" to do, except for aligning the partition if you clone your drive to it.

I don't know if Acronis 12 aligns the partition. If it does, all is good. If it doesn't, then may as well spring for a drive with a transfer kit. The "kit" consists of software which can be installed under Windows, or booted from (my choice) along with a USB 2.0 adapter. In my experience, the software refused to run unless the new destination drive was connected to the USB adapter. The included software DOES align the partitions, and once the destination drive was connected to the USB adapter works really well. I have cloned in such a manner with three systems. Two worked flawlessly. The third, Windows "broke" and required me to boot off a Windows boot repair disc (alternately the Windows installation disc) and "repair" the boot. After it finished booting to disc, the actual repair was near instantaneous. The system has worked fine since then.

If you opt to use Acronis, you can do the physical installation (SSD in original bay, HDD moved to second bay) and then boot off the Acronis disc and do the clone. If you opt to use the transfer kit that comes with some SSDs, hook up the SSD to the USB adapter in the kit and connect it to the notebook, then boot off the software and run the clone. After cloning, then do the physical installation. Either way remember to check for boot order in BIOS to make sure it doesn't keep booting off the HDD.

You may need something like this to install the second drive, plus maybe a caddy or some way to screw in the drive. Do some quick web searches on your notebook for more details. Yes, Toshiba doesn't include it if you purchase the notebook sans second drive. I've seen other companies do that as well, even in desktop computers. For instance I once purchased a Dell tower that did not come with an internal floppy drive mount if you didn't purchase the FDD (had the opening in the front, but internally required a small metal holder for the drive).

 

[WilliamM2]

Before buying the second internal hard drive connector, make sure the board in your laptop has a place to connect it. Toshiba uses the same chassis for more than one laptop model, and they don't all use the same motherboard. Just because it has the drive bay, doesn't mean it's capable of using it.

 

[StarTech]

Wow, wow-wow-wow. Well I just voided my warrenty (only 3 weeks left) and opened it up. The existing drive has connections that look exactly like he SSD's connections that was SATA so that is what I have.

But......Just for the heck I pulled the cover off of the 2nd drive bay and was just blown away. They didn't install any connections for a 2nd drive; it is just an empty bay. How can they possibly be so cheap? This is a Toshiba I7, 8 gigs of ram, 1 gig of Nvidia, 1600x900 screen that I bought direct from Toshiba and they do this to me. Oh boy, I gotta let this settle in......

There has to be a part you need to get to install the drive. I have been a IBM/Lenovo user for the last 20 years, so I am used to the second bay with DVD drive than can be removed and replaced with a second drive caddy, even with hot swap. Does your machine have a permanent DVD drive ?

 

[Okole]

I have a 500 gig drive, the Momentus, and a DVD/CD burner. There is a 2nd hard drive bay which is currently empty. You can see the exact model on Youtube. If you search for Toshiba P770 there are videos to r&r the 1st hard drive, and the 2nd hard drive, along with keyboard, optical drive and others too. It's really quite cool. But the issue with mine is in the empty hard drive bay, there is a 'hole' where the SATA plug would be and you can even see the plug on the main board where its cable would plug if it were present. I did some searching and there are MANY toshiba models as well as HP and others that don't provide the darned plug for the 2nd bay. I didn't have time to fully research it but there are folks that have found 3rd party plugs and are installing them. I guess I gotta do that myself. Once I get that done then I can get a SSd.

I'll check Acronis for the alignment tool, it has so many utilities I'd be astonished if it didn't have it. It does have a clone drive utility.

I gotta run to work, I'll back by here tonight after I've looked more for a plug.
Thanks for the posts and assistance.

 

[Okole]

Ok, to wrap the Toshiba portion of my experience. Toshiba refused to sell me a connector and gave me a phone number of a 3rd party who told me it was back ordered and non-returnable in the event it didn't work since it was special order. Bogus.

I did just order me a Crucial 128 gig from Amazon with the transfer kit with cable and cd. It looks slick and I just watched a video but am curious can I copy just one partition on my existing hard drive to the new SSD? Or, is it a whole disk copy, if so I'm kind of in a pickle.

Thanks for any help

Edit: I did just see the price jump on the Crucial m4 128 SSD kit from the $119 I paid to $134 right after I bought it. LOL!