Bought a Y570 in November last year. Std specs HDD-only model.

Picked up an Intel 310 80gb mSATA SSD HK$1500 last month.

Today, finally installed the SSD and made it the system drive. Did a lot of research online and it was actually easier than I expected, thanks to Lenovo's OneKey Recovery program. So, here's what I did.

- Use OneKey Recovery to create a set of recovery disks (3 DVD-Rs). Choose "Default Factory" instead of current system or saved image because OKR can only use "Default Factory" if your new system drive (ie. SSD) is not the same size as the original HDD.

- Open the large back panel and install the SSD into the mSATA slot at the bottom-est left corner of the exposed chassis. You'll need a screw to screw down the SSD. I used a screw from a 2.5" hdd casing which fit.

- Remove the original HDD. Lenovo's support site has the Y470/570 maintenance manual that has most of the diagrams you need. But it's straight forward enough. Just unscrew the 2 screws and pull the plastic strip to slide out the HDD.

- Put the 1st recovery DVD in, and switch it on. It will eventually boot into OKR from the DVD. Choose to recover "Factory Default" and just follow the instructions. Because you removed the original HDD, the BIOS will automatically boot from DVD (don't have to press F2 rubbish) and will automatically detect the SSD as a bootable drive. Also, the SSD is the only destination drive available for the recovery. I'm sure you can leave the original HDD in place and still make the BIOS and OKR choices to recover into the SSD, but taking it out makes the recovery a no-brainer.

- OKR, the BIOS and Intel Storage Drivers are smart enough to recognise the new system drive as a SSD and will configure the system accordingly. It will do stuff like leave out the Lenovo Partition (which was on the original HDD but won't be in the recovered SDD), unschedule defragmenter etc etc. Consequently, your Windows 7 is configured for a SSD (NO FURTHER SETTINGS CHANGES NECESSARY if you don't want to tweak things further).

- After about 40m, OKR will finish the recovery and it'll reboot. Input the time, language, user etc. into the Windows 7 like it's a brand new laptop.

- Shut down, and put the original HDD back into the bay. Close up the back panel.

- Start up and you now have 2 hard drives. You can now actually dual boot from either the SSD or HDD. Technically... you're done.

- I did some housekeeping though.

- Firstly, I removed all the partitions from the original HDD (even removed the 'unremovable' OEM partition using "diskpart" in the command line. Google "diskpart how to delete OEM partition" and you'll find a step-by-step tutorial from some guy called Jared Heinrich.

- Then I reformatted the original HDD into one big 750GB volume. Now I end up with C: (80GB local system SSD) and D: (750GB second local drive).

- To conserve some space on the system drive, I did the following:

- Stopped using page file on C:
- Moved IE temp folder from C: to D:/TEMP
- Moved Windows temp and tmp folders from C: to D:/TEMP
- Moved Windows Search indexing storage location from C: to D:
- Disabled Hibernation at command line using "powercfg -H". This gets rid of the hibernation file.
- Set the size of Deleted Items folder on C: to 1GB only.
- Moved all the user folders (Documents, Music, Videos, Pictures etc) from C: to D:
- Program installations still goes into C: but you can always install everything on D: if you want.
- You can easily google for step by step instructions for everything above.

All in all, the 80GB SSD C: (74.5GB in file manager) comprises 3 partitions: a small 200MB boot partition, a system partition containing 20GB of system files + 40GB free and a 14.5GB OEM partition. For storage, D: is the original 750GB HDD.

In terms of performance... bootup is around 16-18 seconds from the time you press the ON button to the time you can start a program. Shutdown is half that. Programs start instantly. The Windows Experience Index for Primary Drive is 7.7.

This post has been edited by seantang: Jan 15 2012, 06:18 PM