Results and a Procedure for SSD Upgrade on T410s

Question

After finding that my T410s 1.8" hard drive was 35% - 60% slower than the variety of 2.5" SATA Hard Drives in my older Thinkpads, I selected a Kingston SSDNow V+180 128GB for $219 for the SSD upgrade from Amazon because this Kingston model had the best price for published performance.
If anyone else is thinking of this upgrade, here are the results using CrystalDiskMark to measure Read and Write speeds. (The Kingston has much better Write speeds than the Intel SSD used in some T410s models.)
System:  T410s with 1.8" Toshiba 250G drive > upgraded to Kingston SSDNow V+180 128GB
                                                    HDD             SSD               Improvement
Sequential Read 1000MB           47 MB/s        190 MB/s       304%
Sequential Write 1000MB           46                 150                 226%
Random Read       512KB           21                 174                 728%        
Random Write       512KB           22                 149                 577%
Random Read           4KB          0.30               14.0              4566%   
Random Write           4KB          0.68               16.0              2253%
Upgrade Procedure
To complete the upgrade, I restored a Windows 7 Disk Image from the HDD to the SSD.  Partition Alignment and TRIM were both correct after the transfer to the SSD.  The Windows 7 image was on a USB drive where I maintain a Fresh Install image that has my full setup. 
Notes:  To restore a Windows 7 image from a larger drive to a smaller drive, you must create the disk image after shrinking drive C:\  to a size that permits it to fit on the new smaller drive . . so your larger source drive MUST HAVE unallocated space before creating the Windows 7 Disk Image.  When shrinking drive C:\ on your source drive, shrink it enough so it will easily fit with room to spare on new smaller drive, otherwise Windows 7 image restore will not work.   You can expand drive C:\ to fill the entire new SSD drive after restoring the image to the SSD. (more notes about the source drive below) 
- The Disk Imaging mentioned in this post is built into Windows 7 - Acronis is great but not needed for this SSD upgrade.
- Shrinking and Expanding drive C:\ is done in Windows 7 Disk Management
- Your larger source drive must be configured to have Unallocated Space before creating the disk image.  Its the total size of all partitions on your source drive that matters, even if you don't select extra partions to be in the image. Creating Unallocated Space on the source drive is the only thing that works for using Disk Imaging to move from a larger drive to a smaller drive.  
Important:   Check out post installation Tweaks when using an SSD at this link.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1133897/windows-7-ssd-tweaking-guide
especially disable  Hybernation and scheduled Defragmentation.  Scheduled Defragementation may be set by default on all Windows 7 installations. 
Other Results
Windows 7 boots to the login screen in 16 seconds now compared to 28 seconds before.
The T410s with the Toshiba HDD was a real drag compared to my older T500 and T61 with stock 5400rmp Hard Drives. 
The T410s with the Kingston SSD is now my quickest system.
The measured results I get from the Kingston are a little slower than the results published in an independent review of this drive using the same free CrystalDiskMark utility.  I know my Partition Alignment is good, so maybe the different results are caused by some difference in the computers.  To make sure the disk image transfer wasn't causing a performance hit, I also performed a from-scratch install of Windows 7 directly on the SSD. The performance tests results were the same with either method getting Win7 on the SSD.
The 1.8" Toshiba Hard Drive that came with the T410s was painfully slow, I am a little surprised Lenovo would put this drive in one of their business class systems.
Solved!
Go to Solution.

Answer 1

Thank you for posting this.  It was very helpful in my decision to move from the Toshiba 250G drive to the 256G Kingston.  The performance of the drive is awesome.  I thought I would share a few items on how I went through the upgrade.
I used the Lenovo Rescue and Recovery and performed a full BASE backup.  It took about 12-14 hours to backup around 220 GB. 
I then replaced the old drive with the new drive.
After replacing, I used the two recovery DVDs to restore to factory settings.
After back to factory, I went through all the basic setup so I could use the OS.
I then downloaded the critical update for Recuse and Recovery.
After that I ran rescue and recovery with the option to replace everything.
The restore of the data took 3-6 hours (didn't sit around to watch the whole thing).
Everything was restored perfectly.  No issues at all. 
I had read that you could boot off of the external backup on USB, but I couldn't validate that myself.  Lenovo tech support also said it couldn't be done.  I had reviewed my plan with Lenovo support a few times to be sure I was doing things right.  The knowledge level on R&R is pretty inconsistent.
Also, a note that my original drive was encrypted with PGP Whole Disk Encryption.  When R&R backs up the data it's no longer encrypted and I didn't have a password on the backup.  I turned off disk defrag after the restore.  I confirmed Windows 7 was set to use TRIM.
I highly recommend the drive.  The 256GB wasn't cheap, but I needed that amount of space.  The performance like I said, is excellent.
Good post, swbca.  Thanks!