[Brian]

StorageReview.com is first and foremost a site that reviews and covers the news surrounding storage products. While there's always plenty to talk about, a little diversity is nice. To that end, we're going to expand our scope of coverage to include storage-focused reviews of notebooks and desktops. We're kicking off this initiative with the venerable Lenovo ThinkPad T410. With features like optional secondary 2.5" drive bay, extended battery life, and exceptional system performance, the notebook offers something to impress both consumer and business shoppers alike.

Full Review

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Question! As you state in the review "..each are cloned off the original one that came with the notebook.."

I am trying to achieve a very similar task. I have a Lenovo X201 with a 160GB HDD and I am trying to clone it to a Intel X25-E 120GB.
My tries with Clonezilla are not successful so far. If you could describe your procedure/tools how you did this for the review, would be highly appreciated since the original T410 HDD is 320GB and bigger in size than the target SSDs.

Thanks!

[TSullivan]

Well being a Lenovo you have a few options.

1. Lenovo's own Rescue and Recovery: http://www-307.ibm.c...igr-4q2qak.html

2. Acronis True Image 2011 (What we used, not free)

First option came pre-installed on your system, although if you did a clean install you might have wiped it off. That is more of a lengthy run-around option, but can still be used if you create a "boot" cd/dvd, and backup the data to a designated network source or USB drive.

Second option isn't free, but is probably the easiest solution there is out there. Buy Acronis, make a boot CD or boot USB thumbdrive, have old and new drive plugged into the same system (one might be connected via USB) and follow the steps in the process. It will scale the partitions for you and handle all the steps with as little chance for error as possible. Just make sure you select the old drive as source and new drive as target... don't want to clone blank data to the old drive and delete everything

If you want a more detailed walkthrough of the Lenovo R&R process let me know. Its the free option in all of this, and works great... but has more steps and takes longer.

[Brian]

 TSullivan, on 08 February 2011 - 12:31 PM, said:

2. Acronis True Image 2011 (What we used, not free)

I have to second this...bite the bullet and pay for the software, it's very easy and you'll likely find future uses for it anyway. Paragon also has an announcement out today about their Drive Copy 11 software, it's $40 but I haven't used it.

[TSullivan]

Well if it wasn't Rescue and Recovery I wouldnt mention anything besides Acronis, but in this case its free, works amazingly well, and even compresses the backup so it is easy to store on a server/external drive/etc without acting as a "cloned" drive.

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Thanks!

Since I killed already the Rescue and Recovery hidden FAT32 partition (yeah...) let's go with either Acronis True Image Home 11 or Paragon Drive Copy 11 Professional. Both are $40->

Drive Copy is more appealing to me since it does specifically says it can downsize to smaller drives, even though that is also possible with the Acronis product (obviously)....

Any opinions which or which one not to choose?

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 fallbreak, on 08 February 2011 - 05:11 PM, said:

Thanks!

Since I killed already the Rescue and Recovery hidden FAT32 partition (yeah...) let's go with either Acronis True Image Home 11 or Paragon Drive Copy 11 Professional. Both are $40->

Drive Copy is more appealing to me since it does specifically says it can downsize to smaller drives, even though that is also possible with the Acronis product (obviously)....

Any opinions which or which one not to choose?

Oops, I mixed up the downloadable Lenovo tool with the recovery partition on the laptop. Stil, since I need to use XP, the Lenovo tool might be a bit older.... So I think I'd go with the Paragon solutions and will report back....

[Brian]

I've used the Acronis product dozens of times, never tried the Paragon, though we should resolve that soon. I'm sure it's a fine solution, let us know how it goes for you.

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OK, so I got the Paragon program Disk Copy 11 Professional today.
http://www.paragon-s...onal/index.html

Installation under XP was no issue, started the program and the Easy Launcher gave me several options. One of them is "Migrate OS to SSD" which I chose. After quick selection of source and target, the program was working for about 45 minutes (all under Windows), finished with a success message and explained the next steps to set the BIOS boot order, etc..
I swapped the drives and booted. The BIOS reports "Error loading operating system".... Strike 1.

..developing...

Manual:
http://www.paragon-s...user_manual.pdf

[TSullivan]

Thats what you get for not following the ThinkPad way