Last month my trusty laptop started showing signs of a failing hard drive. It had to happen sometime; this thing is not new. It’s an Acer Aspire 5732z that was given to me by my mom when she got a Macbook. I got it right at the time that I was learning about Linux and how to dual boot, so it saw more than a few reformats while I played around. The hard drive may be a few years old, but I’m sure it was me messing with it so much that hastened its demise. Ubuntu was taking much longer to boot up and I started getting system errors popping up here and there. After that came the scary moment that I could no longer save any files. After booting up, Ubuntu switched itself to read-only mode once it found a disk sector that was corrupted. I wasn’t concerned about my data because I have a great backup system, but it was still a sad moment. It meant a fair amount of reinstalls and reconfiguration. It also meant shelling out cash I hadn’t wanted to spend on a replacement part.

After a bit of research, my choice of hard drive was the Crucial M500 120GB. Since I don’t need much space on my laptop, I knew I could get an SSD small enough to fit in my budget. It was an instant upgrade to an old laptop. A way to breathe new life into this older hardware and make it last me a good bit longer. The install was incredibly easy too. Just two small screws to remove the panel and right inside was the HDD in a cradle. The old one slid right out and I just transferred the cradle to the new drive. Took all of five minutes and I was ready to reinstall.

This time around I was much more comfortable with Linux, so I left out Windows and installed Ubuntu 13.04 alone. Done and done. I’ve been playing with it for about a month now and it really feels like a new machine. It boots up super fast and opens programs in no time. I couldn’t be happier with this upgrade and with SSD’s in general. When I built my gaming rig a couple of years ago, the price/GB was just too high. Now though I’m thinking my next acquisition has to be an SSD to run my games on. That box is already a beast, but with an SSD it would be on a whole new level of awesome!