My girlfriend's older Dell Inspiron N5110 Laptop was starting to get pretty slow despite being maxed out on ram, so I talked her into letting me install an SSD for her. I had previously installed a 525 gb MX300 on my laptop and was impressed with the results. The MX500 has good reviews, a fair price, excellent reliability, solid performance and a 5 year warranty. C/Net has an excellent article on installing an SSD so I used that as a guide. The hardest part was actually getting to the hard drive. My HP was easy to access, but her Dell required a fairly major disassembly. Luckily I had previously replaced the motherboard to fix a charging problem, so I am familiar with the disassembly.
I bought a simple external SSD enclosure with a USB connection so I could clone the old hard drive. C/Net suggested using Macrium Reflect software to create the clone. The program is easy to use and worked flawlessly. Crucial offers their own software, but I was already familiar with Reflect. Compared to the old hard drive, the MX500 is lightweight, fast and quiet. After the installation, I used Crucial's free Storage Executive software to make sure I had the most up to date firmware.
My girlfriend was very happy with the significantly shorter boot time as well as the time it takes to open a program. No more lag time and freeze ups. I had done everything I could to speed up her older drive, but nothing worked and it is probably 10 years old.
| Hard Drive | 1 TB Solid State Drive |
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