02-09-2014 10:00 PM
I'm want to put an SSD in the hard drive bay of my W530 but am concerned about size and the rubber rails that came with the original hard drive. The hard drive thats in there now is a 7mm drive, and I think the SSD I'm looking at is about 9mm high. Is it possible to get different rubber rails to accomodate a taller drive (9mm vs 7mm)?
Also, second, the drive I'm looking at is the Samsung EVO 500 GB SSD, which it says it measures 2.75" wide. Will this fit or do I need to look for another drive? I thought laptop drives were only 2.5" wide, but Samsung claims it's for a laptop.
02-10-2014 07:47 AM
Any 2.5" ssd will fit width- and length-wise You'll only need the rubber rails with the <9mm depth variants.
02-10-2014 08:01 AM
02-10-2014 09:13 AM
Make sure your soft foam material is ESD resistant.
02-10-2014 02:50 PM
I swapped out the 512GB SATA spinner in my W530 for a 512GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD. Fit perfectly using the existing rubber rails.
Just be careful about the orientation of the rubber rails as they attach to the SSD. I don't know if I consciously or unconsciously reversed them (from how they'd been placed on the original SATA spinner), but my initial install had them apparently backwards. I hadn't noticed the two different pictures in the Hardware Maintenance Manual, and this is my first laptop and thus my first hardware change in a laptop.
And even after I did see the two different drive pictures in the manual (which apparently were trying to convey a difference in positioning of the rubber rails) it really wasn't clear to me what they were trying to say.
Anyway, my first "install" had the rails either upside-down or inside-out or something, but the drive itself ended up being RAISED above the power/data connector inside the drive bay cavity. So although I though I had pushed the drive in firmly and could reattach the plastic bay cover holding the drive down, I had actually made ZERO electrical connection with the drive as it was a few millimeters raised from where it should have been and had obviously just slid right over the connector in the bay.
After booting failed to recognize the presence of any drive, I removed it entirely and re-visited the two pictures. I then realized that the rails had a proper "orientation", and maybe they were trying to show a DIFFERENCE in how you used the rails depending on whether you had a spinner hard drive or SSD.
So I just reversed the rails, suddenly realizing that it had just LOWERED the drive a bit when inserted into the bay. And NOW sure enough pushing the drive into the bay definitely felt like I was making contact with the power/data connector inside.
And now sure enough the next boot discovered the SSD present and I was finally off and running.
Don't forget to make use of Samsung Magician software, to optimize use of the SSD with Windows (Win7 Pro x64 in my W530).