How to Upgrade the Lenovo IdeaPad S10's Hard Drive

Lenovo has made it easy to access and replace the IdeaPad S10's 2.5-inch SATA hard drive. All you need to do is grab a mini philip's head screwdriver and a replacement drive, and you can have a larger, faster hard disk or even an SSD.

Before you start unscrewing things, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Removing your hard drive may void your warranty and, should you send the drive in for service, Lenovo will be able to tell that the drive was removed because there's a small sticker that rips when you remove the drive from its bracket.
  
  
• The default hard drive on the IdeaPad S10 is pretty fast. In our tests, the 5,400rpm Western Digital Scorpio blue was speedier than the drives found on most other 10-inch netbooks, returning a speedy transfer rate of 48MBps in HDTach and acing our file transfer test.
  
  
• You'll need to create a backup iamge of the original hard drive before upgrading if you plan to keep the S10's Windows XP operating system. The Lenovo S10 comes with a backup application called OneKey Restore, but we really like Acronis True Image Home, which has a convenient 15-day trial version you can use.

Anyhow, if you're ready to upgrade, ground yourself to guard against static electricity, then follow these steps.