I finally got the nerve to do a Back/restore to replace my hard drive on one of my BCM50's. I used my Acronis True Image 11 home. I did a image backup to my secondary drive on my windows 7 workhorse computer. I them connected my new Intel X25 80 gig SSD and did a Restore. The backup took about 45 minutes and the restore took about 5 hours. What was interesting was that a notice came up that there were errors on the original drive from my BCM50. I told it to ignore the errors and the process ran to a successful completion. I installed the new ssd drive and it works fine. It's nice to not have that Hard Drive noise from the unit. Now to see how long the SSD works. I notice that data backup are a lot faster with the SSD. Anyone else have any reports about their drive swap?
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SSD Works!
- Thread starter Bilcor
- Start date
QueBall780
Technical User
I did SSD on a BCM 450 last year. Used 180GB Intel 335 drives. No problem. Maximum partition size is 127GB so the extra space is just good to have so the SSD controller can do wear level balancing.
If you are doing this on the BCM450 you should get a high quality 2.5" to 3.5" drive bay adapter. I initially bought the only one the local reseller keeps in stock and it this junk Silverstone SDP09. Drives kept loosing connection while I was initially setting this up. You could visually see the soldering was very poor. I had to only do a single drive that weekend because the adapters sucked so badly and I could only find 1 that worked out of the 4 I ended up buying. I ordered some good quality drive bay adapters online.
Good quality unit I had to buy was from ICY Dock. Model MB982SP-1S. Not stocked locally so I had to go back a few weeks later to swap out after hours and get the RAID setup with the second drive that I wasn't able to use initially. I started keeping a few of these on hand for future use when a bay adapter is called for instead of a regular bracket with cables. The 450 of course has the drive bays that expect a 3.5" drive so this style of adapter was required. For most desktop computers or the BCM50 it's not a problem since it uses SATA cables instead of a docking bay style.
One tip, before you put the drives into the BCM first install them into a PC and run the Intel SSD toolbox utility to check for a firmware update. I think the 335 drives I bought had an update when I checked so it's a good idea to install that first. I had trouble doing the firmware updates with the USB adapter I usually use and even the external SATA port was troublesome. I think it's because the external port registered the drives as a removable device. Using an internal port did the trick to update firmware successfully.
If you are doing this on the BCM450 you should get a high quality 2.5" to 3.5" drive bay adapter. I initially bought the only one the local reseller keeps in stock and it this junk Silverstone SDP09. Drives kept loosing connection while I was initially setting this up. You could visually see the soldering was very poor. I had to only do a single drive that weekend because the adapters sucked so badly and I could only find 1 that worked out of the 4 I ended up buying. I ordered some good quality drive bay adapters online.
Good quality unit I had to buy was from ICY Dock. Model MB982SP-1S. Not stocked locally so I had to go back a few weeks later to swap out after hours and get the RAID setup with the second drive that I wasn't able to use initially. I started keeping a few of these on hand for future use when a bay adapter is called for instead of a regular bracket with cables. The 450 of course has the drive bays that expect a 3.5" drive so this style of adapter was required. For most desktop computers or the BCM50 it's not a problem since it uses SATA cables instead of a docking bay style.
One tip, before you put the drives into the BCM first install them into a PC and run the Intel SSD toolbox utility to check for a firmware update. I think the 335 drives I bought had an update when I checked so it's a good idea to install that first. I had trouble doing the firmware updates with the USB adapter I usually use and even the external SATA port was troublesome. I think it's because the external port registered the drives as a removable device. Using an internal port did the trick to update firmware successfully.
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