Can I swap a dvd drive for an SSD place?

[A-Camp Otakucamp]

Hi guys,

I have a Laptop called Toshiba L755-T15 and I was curious if I could replace the dvd drive with an SSD or a hard disk.

I don't need the space so I'd really like to opt for a SSD, so I could make it run faster but I don't know much about SSD power consumption vs what my laptop is capable of. What do you guys think?

I found an adaptor to use on ebay, however I'm really unsure weather I should try it or not.

Does anyone know if L755 support an additional hard disk, power wise? Would this be a good decision?

Please let me know what you think as I'm in a jam about it.

 

[overclockingrocks]

Assuming it's a consumer level laptop bought at a big box store odds are it can't support an SSD or hard drive where the DVD drive would go. Even if it were possible though in theory the dissassembly and reassembly process would be a nightmare. I know personally with my Alienware M14X I can swap the DVD drive for an SSD or extra HDD but it's still a bit of a pain to do it as it's actually physically removing ribbon cables and swapping them. If you want the easiest swapping system I've ever seen go with a dell latitude. They have easy swap bays where all you do is push on a little tab on the side of the dvd drive and give it a pull and it slides out you then replace it with a caddy that simply slides in that has the new hard drive installed. Entire process takes < 10 seconds and requires no tools aside from a screwdriver to secure the HDD or SSD to the swap tray.

 

[A-Camp Otakucamp]

You sure you read my post? A caddy / adapter is what I found on ebay. My problem is that I don't know if it'll support the extra demand in power, I know that the other parts don't require much. In any case I also wrote the people at toshiba asking the same thing but I was hoping there would be someone around with experience with this brand in particular. Since you have Alienware tech, I assume you're not the best suited for answering a question about a middle weight laptop like the L755. Mine isn't exactly high end in anything, yours can probably take on a lot of things without frying. Alas some of us had to shop cheap and are trying to improve without shopping for a new one. Thank you, though.

 

[jaguarskx]

If the adapter is compatible with your laptop, then using it to install a SSD should work. You need not worry about power consumption for a SSD since they consume little power. A "3w" SSD is considered power hungry. It uses less power than a HDD or optical drive because a SSD has no moving parts.

 

[A-Camp Otakucamp]

Alright, so basically you're saying that a SSD would consume less than a DVD-rom drive. Alright, that's what I needed to know. Would size matter when choosing the SSD? I mean, I'm probably going to end up buying an 128 gb SSD, not a small one. So I can move all my programs as well as my windows.

 

[jaguarskx]

Generally the larger, the better. As you may or may not know a the capacity of any storage device is smaller that what is actually advertised. For a computer 1K = 1,024 and RAM follows that rule. However, all storage devices use the convention of 1K = 1,000. 4GB of RAM = 4GB of RAM. A 128GB SSD is actually a 125GB SSD, however, that is prior to formatting so that Windows can recognized. I am guessing that drops it down to around 120GB.

Additionally, I believe for TRIM to work properly on a SSD there needs to be at least 20% free capacity. So if a formatted 128GB SSD works out to have 120GB of usable storage space, then you no more than 96GB of usable space should ever be used.

In case you are not familiar with solid state storage devices like SSDs and flash/thumb drives, each sector can only be written over so many times before the sector become useless. If you use a program to continuously write to a SSD and HDD over and over again, you will find that a SSD will fail long before a standard HDD will. TRIM allows you to extend the life of the SSD, but at a cost of storage space.

You can read more about TRIM in the following link:
http/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

 

[A-Camp Otakucamp]

Thank you, Jaguarskx. It's been really informative.