Introduction

OCZ sent me one of their fancy new Hypersonic notebooks around this time last year and today it is still quite a powerhouse for what I do with it, especially considering its size.

People often mistake it for a netbook, but then see how quick she runs with its speedy Intel mobile Core 2 Duo T9300 and 4GB of memory. I usually upgrade notebooks regularly (once a year), but this baby still delivers quite a punch. But what could we do to give it extra boost?

It came installed with a rather fast 200GB 7,200 RPM SATA notebook hard disk drive from Hitachi and it works rather well. However, I did start to notice that something may have been holding the notebook back, especially loading applications and with boot time. This notebook is often used on the road at trade shows and other events and it needs to be very snappy - of course so we can bring you the news as soon as possible. Now with online video content coming into play, we need a system that will allow us to also edit video and publish online, on the road and wherever we find ourselves when a new product comes out or when a tech story breaks.

With all of that in mind, we decided to run some tests and see if it would be worthwhile or not upgrading our notebook from a standard notebook hard disk drive to a shiny new SSD - in particular, the Intel X25-M 80GB SATA drive. And don't worry, we upgraded to the latest Intel firmware for its X18 and X25 series of SSD drives, which is designed to improve performance.

In this article we run through how to change out your HDD and replace with an SSD, performance, power consumption and finally price and weight considerations before wrapping it all up. Is it time to give your notebook an SSD upgrade? Read on and find out as we deliver the answers right here.