Nokia Booklet 3G FDE SSD Upgrade

A week ago, blinded by its beauty (and long battery life), I purchased the Nokia Booklet 3G netbook. Actually the purchase was not 100% impulsive, as I had done some research beforehand.



For almost a year I have been using the Lenovo X200s laptop, equipped with a solid state drive (SSD). The Lenovo SSD I chose still seems to be the only one on the market, supporting FDE functionality. FDE means the drive strong encrypts everything it stores and securely manages encryption keys. FDE technology does not require any supporting software, which is nice. The only thing it needs is a hard disk password enabled in BIOS. In standard disks, the hard disk password just enables the drive. In FDE disks the password is used to release an encryption key from a TPM chip on the drive. Actually the Lenovo 256GB FDE SSD drive is manufactured by Toshiba, and the part number is THNS256GG8BAAA. I had it in my X200s Thinkpad, in a 2.5 inch bay. While the drive itself is 1.8 inch.




Analyzing the Nokia Booklet 3G I found it was built around another 1.8 inch Toshiba drive, the MK1235GSL 120GB unit. There are two major differences between the two (setting capacity aside). The original 120GB one is mechanical, with 4200rpm speed, which makes the computer very slow. And I mean very. Almost unbearable. The only way to make it usable (but still far from demonic speed) is to swap the spindle drive with a SSD one. I was lucky to have a 1.8 inch SSD in my Lenovo. So decided to make a try.

It is a little challenging to disassemble the Booklet 3G. The chassis is an aluminum monocoque, a single block of metal forming both the upper and lower side of the case, plus sides. Zero screws and bolts. Actually to get to the motherboard you have to take the keyboard off. I did this by inserting a credit card between the keyboard and the display hinge. And then popping the keyboard up from its latches. Once the keyboard is taken away, there is a steel shield you have to unscrew using a Torx driver. The drive is in the middle, not fastened by any additional screws. Just pull it up gently and disconnect the micro-SATA ribbon. The original drive is wrapped in a rubber jacket, I took this jacket off and put it on the new drive. Then plugged the new one to the micro-SATA connector and everything started to work as intended.




After I reassembled the machine back to the factory state (with the new drive in), it showed the SSD drive on the boot screen. After this it was only the matter to install Windows 7 from an external DVD drive. It all went smoothly.




There have been two immediate effects noticeable after the upgrade. The first, obviously, has been the overall speed of the system. I do not have precise benchmarks, but the hard disk score now is 5.9, a remarkable number for such low end Atom - based system. It is a night - and - day difference when compared to the original setup. The computer boots fast, applications launch fast. The memory consumption is lighter, as many spindle - drive associated mechanisms available in Windows 7 arsenal (superfetch, readyboost, application prefetch) are no longer needed.

The second effect of the SSD upgrade is shorter battery life. This may be a surprise for some, but contrary to the general belief, today's SSD drives consume more power than the mechanical ones. In the Nokia Booklet 3G case, the original drive is rated 700mA at 3.3V, while the SSD I have used is 1600mA at 3.3V. So the difference is 3 Watts, what over ten hours means 30 Watt-Hours, or half the available battery capacity. Of course this power rating is peak, not continuous, and SSD drive completes the high power operations in shorter time. All in all in my case I have experienced battery life drop from 12.5 hours down to about 8.5 hours, which still is a significant 30%, but I can bear with that, having a system that does not crawl like a snail. Later I plan to test a different SSD drive (sans FDE encryption), so I hope to report the results here.

In my opinion the SSD upgrade is a must for anyone seriously thinking of making the Nokia Booklet 3G their main / primary machines. I am very happy with the upgrade. I have a really tiny laptop, with big and fast 256GB storage. I also equipped my desk with the iiyama ProLite E2210HDS 22-inch FullHD display I connect to the Nokia via a nice and small HDMI cable that carries both digital video signal and sound. Such screen coupled with a comfortable Lenovo DiNovo Bluetooth keyboard and the original Microsoft Bluetooth mouse makes my home station setup very comfortable. Of course the Nokia is the heart of it and I do love having exactly the very same setup (albeit with a smaller screen and keyboard) on the road.



Update: as an exercise I decided to try another brand of SSD. I was able to borrow the Samsung MMDPE56GTDXP-MVBD1 micro-SATA (uSATA) MLC Thin 256GB drive. Actually calling it a drive is a bit of an exaggeration , as you can see on the photo above, the Samsung SSD drive resembles more a memory module than a drive.

To speed things up, I decided to use the Acronis Clone Drive, plugging the Samsung to the USB port. I used a standard USB-to-SATA adapter (taken from a USB drive enclosure) and a SATA-to-micro-SATA (SATA-to-uSATA) converter.

On the first run the cloning operation failed. The reason behind the failure is quite interesting. Windows 7 introduced a special command, called TRIM, that helps in handling SSD drives (there is a good, detailed explanation here). Some newer SSD drives support TRIM, some older do not. Windows queries drive capabilities and adjusts its command set accordingly. Unfortunately the US15W SATA interface chipset in the Nokia does not support TRIM. So what happens, Windows queries the drive, the drive reports it is TRIM capable, Windows tries to execute the TRIM command, the chipset blocks it and the process hangs. The only workaround is to disable TRIM in Windows before cloning. You do this by opening a command prompt as an administrator and executing [fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 1]. This disables the use of TRIM at the system level, and you can then use any SSD (with some performance consequences on write operations).

On the second attempt, after dealing with the TRIM issue, Acronis handled the cloning operation without a glitch and when completed, I was able to swap the drives. To my surprise the battery life did not improve at all, comparing to the Toshiba - based system, even that the Toshiba drive was rated at 1.7A and the Samsung at 0.8A. It looks like those ratings do not reflect the real power consumption. After a couple of days it even seemed to me the Samsung drive was drawing more power, as I was never able to exceed 8 hours on a charge. Not seeing any benefits from the Samsung drive, I cloned the system back to the Toshiba FDE.