I installed this msata SSD in the WWAN slot in a thinkpad x131e. Boot time was improved. The windows experience for disk went to 7.9 on win7. The install was easy. Net: works well.
Details on the Thinkpad x131e install:
Remove the battery. There is a big panel on the bottom of the x131e that covers all common user replaceable parts (memory,network, wwan, msata ssd, hard drive). Loosen three screws on the panel on the bottom of the x131e but leave them in the panel itsself. Then pivot the panel up from the screw end and remove it. Download the thinkpad service manual from lenovo to see a step by step on how to open the bottom. Very simple.
With the bottom open the WWAN slot is directly accessible. The x131e I was modifying had a 4G modem installed in the WWAN slot. That gets removed by lifting straight up on the antenna wires where they attach to the 4G modem. The wires stay in the thinkpad. The WWAN card gets removed by removing one screw and then lifting the 4G modem up at the screw location pivoting at an angle around the slot.
Once the WWAN slot is free insert the Plextor M5M mSATA drive into the WWAN slot at an angle with the contact edge of the card in teh slot and the opposite end higher. Once the card is sliding into the slot lower the other end of the card. When the card is flush to the motherboard screw one screw in the upper right corner (where slot is on the bottom). I used the screw that was holding down the 4G modem I removed, however the Plextor drive comes with two screws in the package. The Lenovo manual says to only use one screw, so that's what I did.
With the mSATA drive installed, close the bottom up (insert tabs on the side away from screws into slots on teh bottom of the x131e, then flatten the lid in place and tighten the 3 screws that stayed attached to the lid.
Reinstall the battery and Power up. The BIOS showed the mSATA drive and so did device manager.
Install a copy of Windows on the mSATA drive. I used windows device manager to discover the spinning hard drive in the x131e was a seagate then went to the seagate site to download their free disk cloning software (an OEM version of acronis true image). I used the seagate software to move and resize the partitions on the spinning disk to the mSATA drive. This gave me a bootable copy of windows on the mSATA drive.
Then I shutdown, and powered up to BIOS. In the BIOS startup tab you need to click the word 'boot' to get the boot order. This was *not* obvious. Once there, set the mSATA drive ahead of the spinning drive in the boot order. The easiest way for me to do this was to move the existing drive lower rather than to move the mSATA drive higher. Not sure why this was the only way that worked for me, but that's how I did it. SAVE and startup. The x131e booted nicely off the mSATA drive clone copy of windows.
The boot time was faster. I re-ran the 'window experience' benchmark (right click computer, click properties then click windows experience). The Plextor drive maxed the win7 disk benchmark at 7.9, and has not given any trouble so far.
NET: I ended up with 100GB of SSD and the larger original spinning hard disk both installed at the same time in a small notebook. NICE.
Once windows
| Hard Drive | 128 GB Solid State Drive |
|---|
