Solid State Disk for Laptop

I dropped my Kogan Agora 12 Inch laptop onto a stone floor. Remarkably there was no damage to the case or screen (the screen was open at the time and the computer running). But the hard disk was not functioning afterwards, so I replaced the 2.5 Inch SATA disk drive with a Solid State Disk (SSD). This turned out to be a useful upgrade: relatively easy and inexpensive.

Kogan offered me a 30GB SSD, as provided in one model of the laptop, but decided on a larger 60 GB unit (Patriot Memory PYRO 60 GB SSD), costing 50% more for twice as much storage.

Replacing the disk drive required me to un-clip the battery from the back of the laptop and remove one screw holding a small panel over the disk drive. The disk then slid out and I slid the new SSD in. The new disk was completely blank so I booted the computer from a USB flash drive with a copy of Ubuntu Linux on it and then partitioned the disk with that and installed Linux. This took about 20 minutes.

After installing Linux, about 40 GB of the disk is available for data. As I just use the computer for taking notes, the smaller 30 GB disk would have been adequate (with Linux taking up about 20 GB), but the extra space may be handy.

The computer seems to boot a bit quicker but otherwise is no different in operation. I am yet to see if the battery lasts longer with the lower power storage device.