It arrived at the start of the weekend, and I took a bit of time to install it in my laptop, a Thinkpad T61p, about a year old. The installation was pretty easy — one screw to get at the laptop’s main drive, and pull the sled out. I had a little bit of difficulty getting the sled screws out of the old HD, as they were in pretty tight. Other than that, it was a smooth swapout.

I installed the most recent Ubuntu beta, which went swimmingly. Better than any Windows install I’ve ever done. The bottleneck there, unsurprisingly, was the CD drive.

It’s impressive how much quieter the laptop has become, without the spinning drive. plus … it’s fast. I’m not going to compare boot numbers, because I’m not booting the exact same OS after install … but, the boot time is impressive. Under 30 seconds from powered off to login prompt, by my stopwatch. Of that, 7 is spent on the bios screen, and another 5 at the grub menu. All told, it takes about 15 seconds to boot, once the linux kernel starts loading. No reason to worry about turning this thing off anymore… Just need to teach gnome to save my entire session on shutdown, and I’m good. (I have never had any luck with hibernating a laptop, so I’m considering that a non-option)

So, install is done, and I’m pondering how aggressive I want/need to be about limiting writes to the drive. I have no particular worry that I’m going to burn the drive out anytime soon, and my track record with hard drives has always been a little bumpy, so I’m not terribly worried about it. By the time I do burn through all the writes on this drive, I’m sure that I won’t be using this laptop anymore. It’ll probably last longer than a normal drive would.

I’m still getting set up and running it through it’s paces, and I still have to see what kind of an impact it has on my battery life through normal use (when I’m not draining the battery with tons of install related network traffic and CD spinning). Overall, however, I’m really impressed with the difference this makes.