New SSD for me!

I've been going back and forth on getting a new laptop for a few months.  My Lenovo IdeaPad U310 is about four years old and it's been starting to drag.  However, while it was never top-of-the-line, the specs are still decent compared to what I could buy for a reasonable price (translation: "a price I wouldn't feel uncomfortable communicating to my spouse").  So eventually I settled on just upgrading the spinning disk to a solid state drive.

I was slightly apprehensive about this choice.  I've upgraded laptops before, but the IdeaPad officially has "no user-servicable parts", so it clearly wasn't going to be as easy as the last time.  I found a good guide, but the short version is that replacing the drive was simple.  The hard part was getting the stupid case open.

The difference between the SSD and the rotational disk is actually pretty dramatic.  I knew there would be a big performance difference, but it's interesting to see just how big it is on otherwise identical hardware.  Boot time went from "forever" to 15 or 20 seconds.  Running backups and other disk-intensive activity no longer grinds the entire system to a halt.  It's fantastic!  Makes me wish I'd sprung the extra cash for an SSD when I originally bought the system.

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