Intel 320 Series SSD Installation in a Samsung Princeton Ultrabook

I recently purchased an Intel 320 series 120GB SSD hard drive for my Samsung Princeton ultrabook.  The drive was intended to replace my Corsair Force3 SSD that I could never get to work with the laptop.  The Force3 was too large for the laptop and always caused issues with the wireless as soon as the drive was installed.  I tried multiple things to get it to work including taking it apart to make it smaller and making custom carriers for the SSD.  It didn’t seem to matter what I did, the second I installed the Force3 I would immediately get wireless issue.  It would take ages for my laptop to connect to my router, if it ever did, and when it did finally connect it would generally connect at between 1Mb/s and 6Mb/s.  Performance was awful and disconnects were frequently occurring.  I finally decided to return it to Best Buy and decided on the Intel 320 since they had them in stock.

The packaging for the Intel drive was incredibly impressive.  In addition to the drive and the mounting hardware, the packaging included a USB3-SATA cable and a rubber enclosure for your old hard drive, an adapter for a 3.5″ drive bay, a screw driver, an internal SATA cable and power adapter and cloning software.  The USB3-SATA cable, and rubber enclosure for your old drive, is easily a $40 addition to the packaging and really show Intel commitment to the customer.  The price of the drive was $219, which is a little more than my Force3, but the easy of installation and extras more than made up for the additional cost.  I did not try the cloning software as I was running Linux and assumed it didn’t work, so I can comment on how good the software actually is.

The first step of installation is removing the bottom plate from the Princeton.  I had previously done this for the Force3 so there were no surprises here.  I took out the battery first, followed by the protector for the SD slot.  Next came the memory cover, which only has a single screw to hold it in place, followed by the actual memory of the system.  Once the components had been removed, all that remains is eight screws holding the bottom plate on.  I did say 8, even though you will only see 6.  There is a screw hidden under each of the rubber footings.  Carefully remove the rubber footings (I used a plastic flat head screw driver).  They seem to retain their stickiness even after a few removals which is a relief since I had this laptop apart quite a few times when I was trying to get the Force3 to work.

The bottom plate is held on by the infamous Samsung plastic hooks (they have the same thing on my Chronos 7 and my Galaxy Nexus and they are giant pain).  After carefully prying off the bottom you have access to everything you need.  The first time I took apart the laptop I was shocked to see that the hard  drive is not actually mounted via any screws.  It just sits there in a rubber enclosure.  The Intel SSD comes with a black rubber railing on the top, so the first time I tried to install it, I just took out the old hard drive and put in the Intel drive.  After I snapped the computer back together, I noticed a slight buldge on the palmrest right above the drive.  So I took the black railing off the Intel drive.  However upon doing that I noticed the screws now stuck out on the drive and there were no screws that were shorter to use.  So I put the Intel drive in the rubber wrapping that the original drive had and did not use any screws.  It kept the drive together pretty good.  I put the drive back in and there was no longer a buldge on the laptop.

After putting the laptop back together and booting to an Ubuntu USB drive, everything works perfect.  I have installed Ubuntu 11.10 on the laptop and it’s running spectacularly.  I patched the stock Ubuntu kernel with a new scheduler, called FIOPS, which was designed by an Intel engineer specifically for SSD drives.  It’s based on the CFQ kernel scheduler but removes all the code that deals with platter drives and optimizes it for and SSD.  I got the patches from a friend who does Android development and will post more about them in a bit.

The speed of this  drive is amazing.  Even on a Core i3 machine with only 4GB of RAM, this machine flies.  A cold boot takes about 2-3 seconds, which is incredibly.  I’m getting about 200MB/s for transfer speeds in my benchmarks.  Overall the Intel 320 series drive is a great upgrade for anyone.  I would highly recommend the drive, despite seeing a lot of bad reviews out there.  Installation was flawless and I have had zero issues with the drive.