A21M upgrades

[Stampeder]

I am new to this forum and blown away by the level of interest in the old Thinkpads.
I am a fan of my Thinkpad as well and glad to find this forum.
So, I have an A21M that I got back in the 90's along with a docking station. I even still have some 3.5 in floppies for it. It's a beast and just keeps working although I am on my 4th battery.
I run Linux on it and although I also have a Lenovo Yoga I would like to upgrade my Thinkpad to the following:
Upgrade the bios.
Add SSD drive.
Upgrade the RAM?
Add USB somehow.
Anyway that's a good start.
Thanks again to all that contribute to this forum.

[Plunkyy]

Welcome!
A21m should already have a (very slow) USB 1.0 (or 1.1, not sure) port on the back-side of the laptop. You can find cheap msata to ide adapters on ebay or aliexpress to get rid of the spinning disk. The RAM maxes out at 2x256mb DDR I believe, and not too sure about the bios, but I'd imagine you can find old IBM software to update it somewhere online.

[Medessec]

Hello and welcome!

A21m is a pretty cool old unit, I personally like that gen of Thinkpad although it tends to be a little bit less well known. Pretty cool you're roping it together with it's old docking station and accessories, you planning on actually using it for office/home use or just retro-enthusiast stuff?

The latest BIOS can be found here. RAM I believe maxes out at 512MB, 2x 256MB modules of PC-100 DDR RAM. The A21m has a single USB 1.1 port on the back. USB 1.1 is alright for most peripherals like a mouse, keyboard, and even webcams appropriate for the time- but it maxes out at a little over a Megabyte a second of data transfer, which means moving large files from flash drives can be a bit of a pain. You can also add more USB ports by getting USB PC cards for the PCMCIA (Cardbus) slots, there's even USB 2.0 ones.

As Plunkyy said, you should definitely seek out an mSATA to IDE adapter. There's a few on ebay but you can also find them on Aliexpress. They allow you to plug any mSATA SSD into the IDE HDD interface, and most of these adapters come in the form of a caddy that fits exactly how an original hard drive would. I've got a couple of 16GB mSATA SSDs in those adapters in my A22m and several other old Thinkpads such as T30 and T42, and if anything- I'd say this is what boosts the performance of an old laptop the most.

Hope this all helps!

[Gonzaleitor]

I recommend the IDE to M2 adapter. MSata drives are more expensive and harder to find than M2s.

[Stampeder]

Thanks everyone for the replies. I apologize for being so tardy in getting back to this post.
Like most I have WAY to many projects going on at the moment.
I want to get this old thinkpad upgraded because I always liked using it.
Incidentally, I also have a Yoga 2 which really needs a hard drive upgrade as well....It is fun to use being a convertable.
Again, thanks for the responses. Now off the find a drive caddy.