Thinkpad 380XD Drive Replacement \ VOGONS

Thinkpad 380XD Drive Replacement

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First post, by itsmelindsey

Posted on 2025-09-07, 06:59

itsmelindsey Offline

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Joined: 2025-08-28, 03:59

Hello again wonderful people,

My OEM Deathstar (A.K.A Travelstar 4GT) has finally died (week since last backup, rip) and I would like to replace it with the reliability of an SSD. Ideally would like at least 10-12 GB and for the drive to mount to the original tray.
I have seen these Yansen 2.5" PATA(IDE) SSD drives for sale but often only windows XP compatibility is listed. I have also heard that IDE to CF adapter compatibility is also hit and miss, something about the format of newer CF cards.

I use my laptop as a working machine, and I am looking for reliability. I have seen a drive limit of 127 GB due to BIOS issues, I'm keen to hear how well drives of this size worked for anyone who tried it.

Have any of you upgraded to SSD? How did you do it? What issues did you experience? Was it reliable? How well did ~100 GB SSD drives work? What products do you recommend?
I'd love to hear and learn from experienced retro PC users as I've never used an SSD in an older laptop before.

Reply 1 of 3, by megatron-uk

Posted on 2025-09-07, 07:03

megatron-uk Offline

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Location: UK

I've the similar 385ED and I replaced the original drive with a 120GB 2.5 IDE.

If I recall correctly (it was probably 10 years ago) I needed to install OnTrack on the drive as the IBM bios didn't like drives over a certain limit (it wasn't an lba limit, but some arbitrary size).

After that, it worked fine.

Never tried a CF card nor a IDE/mSATA adapter in it, but I use IDE/mSATA adapters extensively in newer laptops (P2 onwards) and they mostly just work. Occasionally you find a laptop that doesn't like the bridge chip in those adapters, but I'd say 80-90% of the time they simply work.

My use case doesn't involve Windows though - these are all strictly DOS machines.

My collection database and technical wiki:
https://www.target-earth.net

Reply 2 of 3, by itsmelindsey

Posted on Today, 10:15

itsmelindsey Offline

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Joined: 2025-08-28, 03:59

Just in case this is useful to anyone else, I ended up buying a Yansen 2.5" 8GB PATA drive and formatted it from my 380XD laptop. The instructions online say to leave the end jumper installed to set it to master but I found that no jumper works fine. Typical win98 install cd-roms and boot floppys worked fine, but I could never get the IBM recovery cd to run. To get the IBM recovery disk win98FE onto my new SSD, I used an IDE adapter on my modern PC and copied over the contents using administrator command prompt (robocopy "[OLD DRIVE]" "[NEW DRIVE]" /MIR /COPYALL /XJ /R:0 /W:0). Then I ran fdisk /MBR a couple of times to rewrite the master boot record of the primary hard drive to match the new hard drive. The Yansen SSD has been running perfectly in the 380XD for the last week, so I'd definitely recommend it as a drop in solution.

Reply 3 of 3, by MikeSG

Posted on Today, 16:13

MikeSG Offline

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Joined: 2023-02-14, 08:31

I don't how often you use the Thinkpad 380, but I bought a no-name PATA SSD for a laptop not too long ago and it forgot all data within one year unpowered.

SSDs typically last one to five years unpowered. HDDs can hold data unpowered for decades. So I recommend those if you rarely use the laptop.

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