Replacing Hard Drive for a SSD in laptop

[squarenuts]

Costco has a Dell Inspiron i17R-2857MRB on sale right now. What I wanted to know if i can replace the HD that come with for an SSD drive.

I have an Intel X25-M SSD and am looking for a laptop to take with me to my deployment to Afghanistan this summer.

[Paul Komski]

As long as you get the correct interface (SATA for that Laptop) there should be no issues as long as the drive has a large enough capacity. If you put it directly into an eSATAp enclosure (or Cable (http://newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=235)) you should be able to choose between the two drives as to which one to boot-up Windows from. Or swap them around, etc.

Can't see why that SSD would not fly on that machine. A smaller, older IDE SSD for a P3 Dell Laptop gave it a new lease of life!

The ESATA/USB port (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESATA/USB) can take eSATA or USB or Combo connections. The Combo would be best - otherwise if using just eSATA the external would need an additional independent power supply in one or other shape or form.

P.S. I don't think the fact that that SSD has a 6 Gb/s transfer speed (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-510-solid-state-6gbps,2881.html) should matter but I haven't been able to confirm that and I can only suspect the Dell has 3 Gb/s speed controllers. Usually one could jumper 3Gb/s drives to 1.5/s speeds when they were not backward compatible but more normally any such hardware advances are backward compatible though being obviously constrained to the slower interface.