Guide to upgrade a laptop old IDE (PATA) drive to a SSD microSata drive. Basically we put a mSATA SSD drive connected through an IDE to mSATA adapter. The adapter is cheap, author recommends the "JM20330 controller" (and a search for "16pin Micro SATA SSD to 2.5"44pin IDE adapter card"). the author also recommends the OCZ Vertex 2 1.8".
Sidenote: the driver seems to be fixed with "foam": "use some foam from the SSD packaging to fill in the open space around the drive so that the drive does not come lose". This might be a no-no for this laptop.
Beware of WD drives:
http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~greg/projects/erc/
I could confirm that this is true in my own WD hdd. No way to change the long delay, so if the drive has an error, we're doomed! No way to easily fix it. Samsung and Seagate have it.
(OK - now (Jan 2012) the WD has a bad sector - LBA from 2638800 to 2638807. Tried to find the particular file associated with this LBA, when into linux, run ntfscluster
sector size 512 (physical 4096) so, should give sector for calcs see wiki and here. General discussion here. But couldn't.
Lack of proper access it seems. HddScan also can't write in this particular part of the HDD. Amazing!
Solved it! Got access from another disk and another OS, Windows XP. Then, with HDDScan (older version 2.1), could finally erase LBA sectors. Disk was ok aftwerwards. Let's see how long it gets until another one pops in. Apparently it was in the OS partition of the disk.)
to control the SCT error recovery control / tler property (described by Quindor)
smartctl -l scterc d:
If correct, this will give you the following feedback on a desktop disk
Quote
SCT Error Recovery Control:
Read: Disabled
Write: Disabled
Now we are going to try and change that value :
smartctl -l scterc,70,70 d:
If that works, you will see the following feedback :
Quote
Read: 70 (7.0 seconds)
Write: 70 (7.0 seconds)
To put it back to original values again, either turn off the power of your system, or run "smartctl -l scterc,0,0 d:"
to control the load/unload cycle count:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1367904
http://www.synology.com/support/faq_show.php?lang=enu&q_id=407
Dos image with wdidle3 http://www.maxishine.com.au/Pics/WDIDLE3/bootcd.iso
Burn this iso to CD then boot from it.
It will enter dos mode then Type wdidle3.exe