Andy -

Thanks very much that is very helpful. I was think of not only leaving the Win install on the old drive I will be moving to the secondary bay but using my Paragon Suite to do mirror backups from the SSD to it (as well as keeping mirror images on an external HD)

I did not know about a higher failure rate on SSD - will look into that. I guess I figured since they seemed more shock resistant it would be the opposite, but I suppose the cause of failure it some other issue. I am a bit of a hardware idiot.

Glad to hear the performance gain is worth the candle. All the goodies should be here today so I can start playing with it.

>Hi Charles,
>
>Replacing the primary drive in my Lenovo T500 with an SDD drive over 12 months ago has been the best hardware upgrade I have ever made. Cold boot times went from over 3 minutes to useable to less than 20 seconds. VS2010 performance is no longer an issue.
>
>I moved the existing HDD to a caddy in the ultraslim bay and installed an Intel SSD as the primary drive. I did a fresh install of W7 64bit on the SSD and can now boot to either drive if required via a function key on startup.
>
>A caveat though - make sure you have adequate backups. SSDs seem more prone to failure than HDDs - see http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html.
>
>Mine failed after 13 months and was replaced under warranty. Reinstalling, restoring and reconfiguring was a pain but once you get used to the performance you wouldn't go back,
>
>regards,
>
>Andy