Last week my beloved Ubuntu MATE development environment exhibited many signals of decay. I found out the laptop’s hard drive is faulting - no wonder, it’s an old laptop with a mechanical hard drive. This post briefly summarizes my thoughts on how I am venturing to install an SSD on my own for the first time.
Let’s face it, we are not jack of all trades. At least, I am not. While I am confident on my software skills, I am not that knowledgeable on the hardware side of computers. However, I have what many people call “hands of fire” and I can easily break up setups while I learn. This is usually not a problem with software as there’s always the option to reinstall, uninstall, push previous versions or as a last resource, format a hard drive. But for hardware, this gets trickier.
The name of this blog post recalls a conversation I had where problems should be called opportunities instead. However, I’m the kind of person who thinks we have both of them - problems and opportunities. My problem is that the laptop is about to die sooner or later because the hard drive is giving up. There are at least 10 damaged sectors. I haven’t been able to continue with my Java exercises because of this. This is the laptop I prepared last summer that has served me very well over these months. Sadly, it’s getting slower and slower 😟
Nonetheless, I have a great opportunity to upgrade my old ASUS laptop with a new hard drive. Why not an SSD?. I quoted how much it would cost me to do this with the local technicians, and it turned out that they only sell Kingston A400 SSD’s, which is not a bad SSD, yet not what I am looking for in terms of performance. On top of paying for the SSD, I would also need to pay for the setup, roughly 50% of the cost of the drive.
So I decided to put that investment in a better SSD, a Crucial MX500* and install it myself. I found a good deal online and made the purchase. I am writing these lines as I am waiting for the parcel to arrive today. But this leads me to my intrinsic learning style. A problem? An opportunity to learn?
- n.b. I was highly tempted to get a Samsung 870 EVO, yet since this is a laptop from 2013, I thought the EVO was too much. I also don’t want to damage such an expensive SSD 🤪
Now that I’ve run into this last difficulty, I think what comes next is a challenge wrapped in a mission - that is, if I want my laptop to be functional 🤪 I have gone through several videos showing how to properly change a hard drive, so it’s only matter of time for the parcel to arrive and doing my first laptop SSD setup myself for seeing whether this mission is successful… or not.
The laptop also has one damaged speaker that I could replace, yet I am waiting for the SSD mission outcome. I do prefer this wording though, mission. It encapsulates the problem, the adrenaline, the challenges and difficulties, and the final reward.
If I am successful, I only need to ensure that my TestMyCode setup works well with my cloned Java exercises repo (Java programming II course). That’s a mission for another day.