HP Compaq nx8220: SSD use?

[Bnedict8220]

Hi everyone!

I have a notebook HP Compaq nx8220 with XP Home edition OS.

I would like to install Windows 7 OS.

1) Is it possible to install Windows 7 OS in this machine?

If it's possible for sure a Solid State Disk would be faster.

2) Is it possible to replace the HD with a SSD HD?

There are some websites that sell a special "caddy" to insert a second HD (SSD too) replacing the Multibay II Optical Drive

http://www.tiny-buys.com/hdd-hard-drive-caddy/hp-compaq-nx8220.html

Is there some chance to make it? Any suggestion to give new life to this notebook is very welcome, because Windows XP is going to be unsupported very soon

Thank you for your attention

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

It is a 2 ghz single core Pentium M (Centrino) processor that can take up to 2 gigs of RAM but has the ATI Radeon x600 graphics which can be made to run the Aero desktop with a modded driver. So yes, you can install Windows 7. It can take an SSD but it is going to be a PATA/IDE SSD which are expensive compared to SATA SSDs, but they do exist. The optical drive to hard drive adapters do not work well on this age of laptop. The optical drive is also IDE/PATA but it is slower IDE like 33mb/s so hard drives connected to that interface are very slow.

128 gig PATA SSD:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1K60RW7578

Newegg also has 64 gig models for about half the price.

If this is "the Answer" please click "Accept as Solution" to help others find it.  

[Bnedict8220]

Dear Dean,

your answer is very kind, precise and professional. I do thank you very much.

Everything is clear, just a last question/advice:

honestly, do you think that the PATA/IDE SSD you mentioned  can improve in some ways the performance of my notebook with the new OS (Win 7) compared to a classic IDE hard drive?

From the website I read "..read speeds up to 107MB/sec and write speeds up to 65MB/sec..".

If it worths the money I will spend for a PATA/IDE SSD without problems

[Huffer]

Yes it will increase performance. Thos data read and write speeds are not real impressive compared to current SATA-III SSDs but they are 2-3 times what you can expect out of an IDE hard drive. 

[Bnedict8220]

Dear Dean,
thank you very much for your further explanation. I'm sorry for my late answer, I was very busy and I tried to get as many information as I could to help also other users.

During my research I found that there is another brand of SSD IDE (Trascend):
http://www.amazon.com/128GB-Transcend-PSD330-2-5-inch-Internal/dp/B00AQT2LRK/ref=pd_cp_pc_0

It's more expensive than the KingSpec one but it has better performance and durability I think. However this is not the real problem. If you read the feedbacks of the two models on Amazon, you can find opposite results. I don't know, it's like something that can work just for some use cases and notebooks.

Inside the following posts you can find users that tried to replace the old hard drive (Hitachi Travelstar 80 GB 5400 rpm ) with a similar one but with more capacity (160 GB) resulting also in this case in opposite results because the system (bios) can recognize just 137 GB.

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-HP-ProBook-EliteBook/NX8220-Replace-harddisk/td-p/1119943#.Uz1...
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-HP-ProBook-EliteBook/nx8220-160GB-HDD/td-p/1024694#.Uz1tulMgre...

In practice the advice is to stay under 137 GB of capacity and with a SSD IDE 128 GB would be great I think.
Transcend's support suggested me to ask HP about that but you Dean told me that it's fine.

At this point I think that the solution is to buy the SSD IDE and try it... if it will work or not is not trival to say before the purchase.
 I'm going to buy it, (maybe Trascend 128 GB because it seems to be better), and I would like to share with you the compatibility but.... if somebody already tried it inside HP Compag nx8220 please do share your results, it would be very helpful.
Dean and other users, if you have some other advices to give before the purchase, please write further information.  They would be very precious. In the meanwhile I will accept the second answer as the solution