Originally Posted by
chx1975
... Most importantly there is an adapter
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...9SIA1K60RX7223 to convert any 1.8" SATA disk to the old 44 pin standard. The ThinkPad T400s used these 1.8" uSATA drivers and there are aplenty SSDs for it on eBay for a reasonable price. If you pick a used one, make sure the seller properly erases them with
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/deta...cID=MIGR-68369 this utility (nope, format, fdisk etc is not going to cut it) cos you'll hard time doing it but other than that, a used SSD is most likely fine.
I too have a few questions/comments about this post...
The link specified for the adapter shows up as an external USB enclosure which accepts a PATA 1.8" drive. Useful as that might be it is not a PATA > SATA converter and must be used externally.
I think there's confusion here between SATA (2.5") and mSATA (micro SATA, 1.8"). Yes you can get an adapter to make a mSATA drive work with a normal SATA port like this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817998176, but this probably isn't very useful unless you have an old mSATA drive hanging around.
My Thinkpad T400s has a normal SATA bay and accepts a standard 7 or 9mm height drive. It does not have a old 44-pin PATA port and many people confuse the internal port as being a mSATA slot, but it's really just for WWAN which has the same connector. You can put either a mSATA drive -or- WWAN card in newer laptops like the U310.
With the price of SSDs being < $1/GB I wouldn't consider a used SSD. They have a limited # of write cycles before they die. With load-leveling algorithms they'll last years but if you torture them with 24/7 write cycles they can fail within a few months.
Skipping to the crypto. Almost all new drives support full disk encryption - if you go into the bios and set the HDD password this enables it. If you just set the administrator password on your laptop to prevent others from accessing the machine and your laptop gets stolen the thief would just have to take out your hdd/sdd, plug it into another machine and read your data. With the HDD password set the password must be sent to the drive before anything happens. You can't even easily reformat the drive without first sending the password. Very important to remove the password before retiring a drive as it may be machine dependent, I've taken a password protected drive from a T-series Lenovo, plugged it into a S-series Lenovo and couldn't unlock it even though I entered the same password. I believe that the utility chx1975 mentions just erases the password - this renders the data unusable (if a password was set) but allows the disk to be reformatted.