Meet the new laptop ...#

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 19:26:19 +0000

... same as the old laptop. Seriously. The only time you will see the word 'fast' in the same sentence as Sandisk U100 is in articles recycled from the press release they sent out at launch. And maybe now here, in the sentence "I threw away my Sandisk U100 and replaced it with something fast".

I mean, it has to be said, there may have been something wrong with my particular drive -

  $ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1000 of=/home/dan/zeros.bin 
  1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 230.009 s, 4.6 MB/s 

though I'm not the only one so ... maybe not. ANYWAY. Point being, I replaced it with a Plextor M5M and it's fixed all the odd stalls and hangs and stutters that I used to experience on this machine. Which is lovely, because reformatting it with ext4 a few months ago so completely didn't.

A summary of the upgrade process

1. remove 11 or so screws from the bottom of the case. Use a decent screwdriver, because if your machine is like mine, the screws are (1) made of cheese; (2) held in with threadlock
2. remove the bottom of the case
3. look for the bit that looks like an msata ssd. Pictures of msata ssds are available on the internet
4. remove the foam pad stuck to it
5. unplug and remove it
6. plug the new one in
7. reassembly is the reverse of disassembly

In summary, not hard. And I can confirm that my puppet manifest worked pretty much perfectly for reinstalling it. With the exception of a couple of dependencies I forgot to declare, but nothing that running puppet twice didn't fix.