Hello everybody, First I want to say that I love the T23 Laptop. Just plain great. But I have been doing some research into putting a solid state drive into it. The reason for this is that I have IBM's fastest OEM hard drive, but it still isn't fast enough. The CPU and RAM are just fine, so I wanted to get a SSD. Any recommendations on compatible SSDs? Thanks in advance, Keagan

welcome to tpf!

my guess is that you can't put any ssd into a t23. it's been a while since i used a t2x, but iirc, it has an ide/pata interface (predating sata), and, as far as i know, all ssds are sata.

if i've misstated this, i'm sure someone will be along shortly to correct.

cheers!

The T23 indeed use a PATA hard drive. There are PATA SSDs out there, in both 2.5 inch and 1.8 inch form-factors, but they are more expensive than the more common SATA counterparts.
Alternatively, you can get a smaller form-factor SATA SSD such as 1.8 inch or mSATA, and use a PATA-SATA adapter.

and then it slots into the standard hdd bay? interesting...

See this post for the adapter approach: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=99771

Given the transfer speeds and overall computing power of a T23, that would be a tremendous waste of money IMO...

Another thing to consider is that XP needs a serious amount of tweaking to run half-decently on SSD, and even then...well, let's just say that I was underwhelmed with the experience on ThinkPads far newer than T23...and W7 is a really bad idea on a platform of this vintage...

Another option - probably the least painful one - would be some *nix flavour, since most of the recent distros support TRIM...

Good luck.

I have been using a SSD (Transcend 8Gig) on my T23 for the past five plus years(Xp). Unfortunately I did not set it up, but I do know there is no adapter.

I usually never see this (T2x and T3x) sub-forum, but by coincidence I just stumbled across this thread, and I would like to make a contribution which I am certain will be of interest for those who might consider upgrading their e.g. T22 from having an old, slow mechanical (PATA) harddrive to having a FAST SSD, as I understand our new member (and welcome!) techningeer is asking about/potentially considering:

In the threads 1.8" SATA to 2.5" IDE converter? and T42 SSD Conversion Success (1.8" SATA drive + bridge board) the use of a 1.8"-SATA-to-2.5"-PATA bridge is discussed; it will allow a 1.8" SATA SSD to be mounted in an older ThinkPad, which are designed for having a 2.5" PATA drive. As seen from those two threads, focus there is on T4x ThinkPad's, but the same adapter can also (!) be used in e.g. a T22... I know this from actual experience by forum.thinkpads.com member GACrabill. Gary and I have for some time been testing one 2.5" PATA SSD (a 60 GB OWC as discussed in the thread 2.5" PATA OWC Mercury Legacy Pro SSD: Performance in T42?) and different 1.8" SATA SSD's in different ThinkPad's (a T22, a T40 and a T42p), with both Windows XP and with Windows 7. The T40 and T42/p results will be posted shortly in the two above-mentioned threads.

In the thread T43 Installed Transcend SSD observations **PICTURE LINKS*** the performance of another (cheaper) 2.5" PATA SSD is discussed; I guess that this SSD will also work well in a T2x.

In his T22, Gary tested the speed of his (old!) 60 GB, 5400 rpm mechanical HDD and the speed of a Kingston SSDNow V+180 128 GB SSD (it is a microSATA II 3 GB/S 1.8" SSD with model number SVP180S2/128G). The following CrystalDiskMarks (ver. 3.0.1) performance was recorded by Gary with his T22 (having a 900 MHz Intel Pentium-3), under Windows XP, for three SSD's:

First is shown the diskspeed of the 60 GB, 5400 rpm mechanical (PATA) HDD:



Next is shown the diskspeed of the 60 GB 2.5" PATA OWC SSD (model OWCSSDMLP060):



... and finally the diskspeed of a 128 GB Kingston 1.8" SATA SSD (with the 1.8"-to-2.5"-SATA-to-PATA adopted, mentioned above) is shown:



Notice that there is no information about whether the XP installation on the two SSD's were partition-aligned or not (partition alignment is known to may have a significant impact on the SSD speed/performance on some drives, especially under XP... but the issue of SSD partition alignment is not a topic for this post).

Gary made the following remarks to these three SSD's when used in his T22:

a) The T22 XP performance with the OWC PATA SSD is noticeably slower than the Kingston mSATA SSD results. The OWC PATA SSD keeps up with the mSATA SSDs in the DMA-5 IDE controllers of the T40, but the mSATA SSDs do better than the OWC PATA SSD when installed in an older T22 with a DMA-2 IDE controller.

b) The HDD activity LED does show activity when using the OWC PATA SSD in either Windows 7 or XP (Johan's addition to this comment: The HDD LED does not shown any activity when using the 1.8" Kingston SSD with the eBay 1.8"-SATA-to-2.5"-PATA adapter).

c) The OWC PATA SSD works fine in a T22 running XP, and there are no weird driver messages at every boot-up like there were with the Kingston mSATA SSD.

d) The T22 XP 4K Read/Write performance with an SSD is almost the same as a T40 XP 4K Read/Write performance (Johan's note: The T40 results are not shown in this post, but will be added to pne of the first mentioned threads). Very interesting that a really old T22 on XP can be improved with an SSD to the same random 4K read/write performance level as a T40 on XP using the same SSD.

To emphasize: The purpose of this post is solely to share information which I have not seen reported anywhere. I hope and believe that this post is of interest for those seeking knowledge, and the purpose of this thread is therefore NOT to say anything like: "Anyone should immediately rush out and replace their old, slow mechanical HDD's in their e.g. T2x ThinkPad's by expensive SATA or PATA SSD's".

In my opinion it is (of course!) for anyone to decide on his/her own whether it is worth the expense to upgrade an old laptop, such as a T22, with an expensive SSD. All this just added to avoid obvious, non-technical comments.

Again, all credit for the achievements reported in this post goes solely to forum.thinkpads.com member GACrabill...

PS: I hope that this report might fuel an interest for other members to test these SSD's also in other "old" PATA-ThinkPad's, such as the R5x/p's, A3x/p's etc...

Johan

Through some tinkering with an X41, I wound up with an Intel 1.8" 80GB SATA SSD (SSDSA1M080G2HP). After reading the posts above about using 1.8" SSDs with adapter boards, I was curious how this would work in my T23 (2647-8MU). It was running fine with a 60GB, 5400 RPM mechanical drive, multi-booting OpenSuSE 12.1 Linux, Windows XP Pro, and Windows 98SE.

I got an adapter for $4.19 on e-bay, and started the experiment. I used Paragon Software's Backup & Recovery 2012 Free Edition to make images of the partitions for Win XP and 98SE, and OpenSuSE /home. I switched drives, used Parted Magic to create partitions on the SSD, then used Backup & Recovery to restore the three images. I installed OpenSuSE 12.2 from scratch, keeping the restored /home partition. That gave me a working boot loader. After a bit of tweaking, all the OS's worked as they had with the mechanical drive.

Here are results of benchmark tests for the two drives:




The SSD was actually a bit slower for sequential operations, but much faster for everything else. In practice, I really do not notice a significant difference in performance between the two drives for the tasks I normally perform.

Is it worth replacing a working mechanical HD in a T23 with an SSD? In my opinion, no.

Is a 1.8" SSD with an adapter worth considering to replace a dead mechanical HD? In my opinion, yes. PATA/IDE 2.5" mechanical HDs are becoming less available and seem to be getting more expensive. Now a new 5400 RPM 80GB mechanical drive costs about $50. With some judicious shopping, a used 60 to 80GB SSD plus adapter can be bought on e-bay for about the same price. Then, when the T23 truly dies, you have a semi-modern drive to use elsewhere.

As a further test, I put the SSD in my 600E (2645-4A0). It brought up the boot loader graphic screen correctly, indicating the BIOS could get into the extended partition. There was no point trying to boot since all the drivers were for the T23.

Finally, I put the SSD in the 310ED (2600-50U). Powering on got some text from the boot loader, then an error message that the partition did not exist. The BIOS on the 310ED cannot deal with a drive anywhere near this big.

For both the T23 and 600E, I did a fair amount of disassembly to get to the hard drive connector to ensure the pins were inserted correctly; same with removal to get the adapter out of the PATA plug.