upgrading a legacy notebook with a contemporary ssd

The Samsung R580 is like the Timex watches of yore, when they “took a lickin’ and kept on ticken’.” Or maybe it should be compared to something more contemporary like the Energizer Bunny. Regardless, the R580 continues to do yeoman duty, what with its ‘mere’ 4GB of memory and now-modest Intel Core i5 m430 processor. It was originally purchased with Windows Vista installed back in 2010. It was upgraded to Windows 7 when that was offered as a free upgrade, and stayed that way until Windows 7 decided to corrupt itself. When that happened I installed Ubuntu 13.10 on it in December 2013. It’s been an Ubuntu workhorse ever since.

When I upgraded the R580 to Ubuntu I replaced the keyboard and put a new 500GB hard drive in it to match the size of the original hard drive. Over the years I started to replace the hard drive, first with a 1TB model, then a second just to make sure that at least the rotating media was kept up to date. I thought about upgrading to 8GB, the highest you could go with this model, but I just never got around to it. This December, I decided to be a bit more drastic with my upgrade.

As you’ll note above, I upgraded the R580 with a 1TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD. The price finally dropped low enough to make installation a no-brainer. I’d already upgraded a Samsung 17″ running Windows 10 with a 1TB Samsung 950 Pro, and I’d purchased a mid-2015 MBP with a 1TB SSD built in. So I was quite appreciative of how an SSD significantly speeds up a computer. It just made more sense to spend the money on the SSD rather than more memory, so when the Christmas sale on the 850 EVO was announced I picked up a copy, along with a Sabrent USB adapter. With Clonezilla on a USB thumb drive, I booted into Clonezilla and proceeded to clone the HDD disk to the SSD. Total time took about two hours, most of which was just waiting for it to finish. Once finished I swapped the HDD out for the SSD, booted the system back up, and here I am writing this blog entry on it.

Before you ask: No, dd is not as good as Clonezilla, at least not for this use case. For example, Clonezilla (for which I have extensive experience) will analyze the drive to be cloned and only copy over what needs to be copied over. dd is blind in that it duplicates the entire drive from one device to another. And in order to make that work you still need to boot into a live version of the OS from a thumb drive, so the amount of prep work is identical. It makes far more sense to use Clonezilla.

Needless to say, everything is so much faster, from startup and shutdown to launching applications. And if it goes to swap, well then, it goes to very, very fast swap. I don’t intend to do any more hard disk upgrades, just as I don’t intend to update the OS beyond Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I’ll keep using the R580 until it literally dies of something, I’m not sure what. I keep thinking I’ll replace it with another used notebook, but its overall combination of reasonable performance, many ports, and the fact it has a Blueray drive make it hard to find a replacement for, now that everybody and their relative wants to drop ports and repairability and upgradability in the name of convenience, cost cutting, and dare I say it? Lock-in.

Here’s to another five years of drama-free usage.

2/3rds the way home

I’ve been spending the day traveling from Kumamoto back to Orlando, via Tokia’s Haneda and Minneapolis. Right now I’m sitting in Minneapolis trying to fight off the chill brought on by the outside temperature of 5 degrees F. For a Florida resident (I’m not a real native, mind you) that’s just too cold. It never got that cold in Atlanta where I grew up, although it certainly tried from time to time. No, this is just too cold. And the travel back with this long layover (I’ve arrived from Tokyo 12:45pm local time) only adds to the long slow grind of getting home.

Thankfully there’s no more long business trips for 2016, just Christmas with the family. But next year promises to be just as grinding with trips up to Kansas during the winter, as well as next year’s business support trip north of Tokyo near Sendai.

I managed to catch a few multi-hour naps from while flying out of Tokyo. When I woke up, it was about an hour out of Minneapolis. Outside it looked cold and remote, covered in snow. Almost like an alien landscape.

Photos were taken with the iPhone 7 Plus, and post processed using VSCO’s various filters; Distortia Pack for the top, and B4 for the bottom. This post was written using WordPress’ latest iOS app on an iPad Pro 9.8″. Getting the photos to the point where they were visible to the WordPress app required a number of non-intuitive steps, but otherwise the WordPress app makes writing a quite post like this reasonable.