SSD retrofit in an old laptop?

How close are we to an 8 GB IDE 2.5" form factor SSD hard-drive
replacement for an old laptop or notebook computer, allowing it to
become a totally silent word processor / email / whatever, with long
battery life? Target price: $150 (US) or less.

--
Jonathan Berry

"Jonathan Berry" writes:
How close are we to an 8 GB IDE 2.5" form factor SSD hard-drive
replacement for an old laptop or notebook computer, allowing it to
become a totally silent word processor / email / whatever, with long
battery life? Target price: $150 (US) or less.

http://www.logicsupply.com/product_i...roducts_id/337

plus

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820211048

total under $100.

Jonathan Berry wrote:
How close are we to an 8 GB IDE 2.5" form factor SSD hard-drive
replacement for an old laptop or notebook computer, allowing it to
become a totally silent word processor / email / whatever, with long
battery life?

1. Replacing your laptop's hard drive may cut down on noise enough to
make you happy (though I'm not unhappy with the amount of noise my aging
Thinkpad 570E's laptop's hard drive makes, and newer drives allegedly
are even quieter), but it won't make the laptop anywhere nearly 'totally
silent' unless the laptop doesn't have an internal cooling fan for the
processor/MB (mine does).

2. Replacing your laptop's hard drive won't make a significant
difference to battery life, since the hard drive typically is only about
15% of the total load (the processor and display, including back-light,
being the major culprits - converting to led back-lights should help the
latter soon in new laptops). I've had luck using supplementary
batteries that I steal from my power tools when I want longer
disconnected operation (my 18v Makita batteries need about 4 3A diodes
to step them down under minimal load when fully charged to the 17v upper
limit that my Thinkpad's hardware manual specifies), but of course there
are commercial sources for laptop-specific supplementary batteries as
well (or you can cobble up your own using NiMH cells - it takes about 12
in series to produce what my Thinkpad wants to see, but using AAs you'd
probably want to get fairly high energy ones - over 2Ah - and use them
in parallel pairs or even triplets; my Thinkpad cuts over to using the
internal battery when its external supply voltage drops to about 12.5v,
which is about a reasonable maximum discharge limit for both the
approaches I just described).

- bill