SSDs work in the T23 and T30

[Raidriar]

Just chiming in with my restoration projects on the T23 and T30, I bought some cheap chinese msata to pata converters, coupled with some Intel 313 24GB SLC mSATA SSDs (the only reasonably priced SLC SSD I could find in this form factor...), and they work great! Response times are better, no moving parts to deal with, and they are lighter than the HDD. SLC is what I went with because it doesn't need TRIM, something these machines don't support, so SLC was the only acceptable route. Weirdly enough, the T43p doesn't agree with this method...I will probably be putting the same setup into the 600E down the road as well. Glad not to deal with spinning drives any longer.

[axur-delmeria]

The problem with the T43p is that its HDD port is actually SATA, but passes through a SATA-PATA bridge chip. Having two SATA-PATA bridge chips in the same port generally leads to problems (the mSATA adapter has a SATA-PATA bridge chip).

[ac12]

Agree
I've put SSDs into several of my older laptops, to give them a bit more usable life.

BUT, the OS and SW is what is ultimately killing these older machines.
My T23 is stuck at Win-XP or a Lite Linux.

Even web surfing is a PiA, since the computer can't handle the graphics on most of the web sites.
I "think" the network connection is 10-baseT, so you also have a network bottleneck.

But for standalone word processing or spreadsheet work, it is just fine.

[tadek]

Great! Do you think I can try the same with my T20?

[ac12]

Yup.
I've put inexpensive SSDs (mSATA via a mSATA to PATA adapter) into several old laptops that I could not bear giving up (T23 and Dell C400, maybe next a G40). I think the C400 did not like a particular mSATA to PATA adapter. Switched to a different brand/type adapter, and it worked.

BUT, the old OS (WinXP) do not handle SSDs, so you need to partition the drive using a 3rd party tool that will partition the drive as a SSD. And that was a pain.
As I remember, I had to
1 - Put the SSD into an external USB case
2 - Then run the partioning SW to it, specifying SSD.
2a - This was tricky. I made a mistake and had to fix the MBR, which took HOURS of research to figure out and fix.
3 - Remove the drive from the external USB case, and install it into the computer.
4 - Install the OS onto that partition. I do not remember if I formatted the drive or if that was part of the partitioning sw tasks.

The SSD also extends the battery life, so that helps with these old laptops with short battery life.

Additional functions:
- USB2 - I put a USB2 PCMCIA card into the computer, to give me USB2 speed. BUT the cards require external power to run anything more than a flash drive.
- WiFi - I have use PCMCIA WiFi cards to get WiFi on laptops without internal WiFi. The Dell C400 had the antennas in the computer so I could just add an internal WiFi module, the T23 did not have antennas so required the PCMCIA WiFi adapter.
- NIC - I have not tried a 10/100 PCMCIA network card.

For local work (word processing and spreadsheet) it does just fine.
As was mentioned, web sites today require so much graphics processing that web surfing is where these old computers fail.
Also many software today do not support XP, and won't run. So you have to replace them with sw (current or old) that will run under XP, and that is getting harder to find.