I have an 8-year old HP laptop that came with Win7, a 3rd gen i7 CPU, 8GB RAM, a 750GB HDD and a 32GB mSSD which was used in a Intel RST (raid) configuration to accelerate Windows startup. Two years ago, the 750GB SSD crashed so I replaced it with a 1TB SSD (upgrading the OS to Win10 at the same time). As the 1TB SSD was even faster than the 32mSSD I saw no reason to continue using the latter so I disabled the RST configuration in the BIOS. Now I'm wondering if there's anyway to boost this old laptop's performance by using that mSSD as some sort of cache-drive?
I agree with xxJackxx. Not worth the effort (or cost). Laptops just are not designed to be upgraded and/or modified. They are too proprietary. The makers would much rather you just buy a new laptop. And frankly, being 8 years old, it maybe time to consider that anyway. I would be hesitant to throw money at a laptop that old. The battery is likely to go soon, if it has not already. If socketed, you might be able to upgrade the CPU, but then you likely will have increased cooling requirements and those are always a challenge with notebooks anyways. It may increase your power requirement too. And certainly you could not move that CPU to another computer as it would be several generations old. You might be able to up the RAM to 16GB but 8GB is already a nice chunk so any gains there will likely be marginal and only some of the time - if at all. And the odds the new RAM would be compatible with a modern build are slim too. So nope. I think if you are looking to upgrade performance, that would be best done with a new laptop with all new generation components.
@Bill_Bright, I'm not looking to spend much, if anything on this laptop, as it's performing well enough except perhaps for a few hours a week when I run some 'RAM guzzling' Adobe software. It is for those taxing occasions that a performance boost would really be nice. Hey, I'm just trying to find productive use for that mSSD. As for considering a new laptop, my income is stretched pretty thin nowadays!
No, I don't need to accelerate Windows startup as that's never been a problem on this laptop. Ever since replacing my crashed HDD with an SSD (and disabling the Intel RST RAID configuration) I have a dormant 32GB mSSD that I thought might be used (in some way) to speed-up editing large photo-files.
I understand but my answer remains the same. Look at the specs of your 1TB SSD. I suspect it is on par or perhaps even faster than that 32GB mSSD. Inserting a slower drive will, in effect, insert a bottleneck. Unless you are running critically low on free disk space on that 1TB SSD, I recommend you just leave everything as is.
Bill, my 1TB drive is not low on free space, so I accept your suggestion that there's no way the original mSSD can be put to use as even a poor substitute for more RAM. Thanks (and to @xxJackxx) anyway for your input...
