I have an old Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop. Although it’s very old, it’s more than enough for the job I want it to do. I would like to put a SSD into it, maybe something like this one.
The motherboard is really old. Is there any chance that this won’t work? Will I benefit from the the SSD speed?
6 Answers 6
According to the images here, it’s just a normal laptop drive that can slide out of the side. So, yes, that drive would work.
Without further information, I would wager to say that you would benefit from an SSD. I have seen many laptops that are a similar age running very smoothly, thanks to a shiny new SSD.
One final note, I have seen better deals out there for SSD’s. I just purchased a few 120GB SSD’s for just shy of $70 each. I frequently check out Lifehacker Deals for SSD’s, they always seem to have at least one on their list.
Your laptop has SATA drive, so any 2.5 drive will probably fit and work.
Before you buy SSD drive, I’ll recommend you to increase memory as much you can (at least 4G) to prevent swapping, which can rapidly decrease SSD lifetime.
About performance — it depend on situation. You can see by checking HDD LED. When laptop react slow and LED lights up and you have enough free memory (check in Task Manager), then HDD is bottleneck and SSD will improve performance.
In case your computer just swapping to HDD, extending RAM capacity should be enough.
Yes you will benefit changing drive to SSD despite older SATA controller. The key feature of SSD is very low access time in compare to HDDs, you should notice gain in performance especially on system boot and running apps. Although file copy transfer should also increase significantly.
Did you decide to get the SSD and if so, were there any problems with installing it?
Most modern SSDs (SATA3) are backward compatible with the SATA 1 & 2 — at least in theory.
There were some problems with physical installation due to the drive being slightly slimmer. However, as far I know after some tinkering people got it working.
I installed a SanDisk SSD + 250GB SSD on a Dell Inspiron 1525. With the spacer supplied along with the disk, it was a cakewalk! There is a large difference in system performance now 🙂 Thanks to ejn63 !!
As the system limits the speed of SSD to 160MBPs, there is no point in going for a faster SSD and wasting money.
- Remove two screws and remove the existing hard drive.
- Remove 2 screws on caddy and remove hard drive tray.
- Place the SSD in the tray and fix caddy and fix two screws.
- Fix the spacer (supplied by SanDisk along with the SSD) on top of the SSD.
- Insert the whole thing back to system.
- Fix 2 screws at bottom of the system.
- Reboot and check BIOS.
Least over-engineered answer: 1. SSD HD is probably a little thinner than a conventional 2.5 drive. 2. This may be causing the connections to not meet properly. 3. Install the drive without metal casing. You may see that the 2.5 SSD connects with a more snug feeling. 4. If this works, you can secure the 2.5 SSD without the metal framing. You’ll never know it is missing.
5. I followed this process to success. Also note this 2.5 SSD is probably the last upgrade for this model laptop "Inpiron 1525." The computer is now noticeably faster than the standard 2.5 hard drive. Dare I say lighting fast on booting and browsing.
OS used for both HD: Cloudready Chrome OS.
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