Thinkpads Forum

Hi - I'd like to get a SSD for my T-60, probably 60 to 64 gb. I'll be dual booting linux and xp. I don't store much stuff on my laptop - my concerns are price and reliability and I don't want to buy the latest and greatest if I can get by with something a little older and cheaper - Suggestions ?

my two cents would be
+ Intel 320, Retail Box, 5 years ltd. warranty, one known seldom bug ("8 MB"), probably not fixed by FW update
+ Samsung 470, 3 years, only one problem (BSOD) known until now, which is fixed by FW updaed

Both have good tool support under Windows only.
I have an Intel 320 in one of my T60's.

On my next purchase I'll go for the Samsungs, just because those look really beautiful.

retired wrote:Hi - I'd like to get a SSD for my T-60, probably 60 to 64 gb. I'll be dual booting linux and xp. I don't store much stuff on my laptop - my concerns are price and reliability and I don't want to buy the latest and greatest if I can get by with something a little older and cheaper - Suggestions ?

I echo lophiomys's call on the Intel 320 SSDs. I have one in my T60 now and it functions flawlessly. Plus with a 5 year warranty it can't be beat. Just make sure that if you go the SSD route you make backups every once in a while. While the 320 has a very good reliability record any SSD, or HD for that matter, can go at any moment. With a HD you may get a telltale warning. With an SSD you won't get a warning and if you don't have a backup then you're in trouble.

IMO, just go for a Intel 320, get the 5 year warranty, and do regular backups (or incrementals). You should be fine.

The only thing I'd have to add would be this: if you're looking into going the SSD route, consider the move to W7 from XP as well.

I've played with a variety of tweaks on different SSDs in XP and was not pleased overall. While I have my gripes with W7, it runs much smoother on SSD and any T6x unit is powerful enough to handle that OS properly.

Intel would get my vote, haven't tried Samsung yet.

My $0.02 only...

lophiomys wrote:my two cents would be
+ Intel 320, Retail Box, 5 years ltd. warranty, one known seldom bug ("8 MB"), probably not fixed by FW update

The rare "8MB" bug was fixed in a firmware update a few months ago. An advantage of the Intel SSDs is the Intel Toolbox software which will tell you if your firmware is current and give you the option of updating it.

ajkula66 wrote:The only thing I'd have to add would be this: if you're looking into going the SSD route, consider the move to W7 from XP as well.

I've played with a variety of tweaks on different SSDs in XP and was not pleased overall. While I have my gripes with W7, it runs much smoother on SSD and any T6x unit is powerful enough to handle that OS properly.

Intel would get my vote, haven't tried Samsung yet.

My $0.02 only...

I bow to ajkula66's knowledge and wisdom and would just make a point that he forgot. Win7 supports TRIM, XP does not. While an SSD can work with XP that platform lacks the optimization that Win7 provides. Just something to consider.

GACrabill wrote:
The rare "8MB" bug was fixed in a firmware update a few months ago. An advantage of the Intel SSDs is the Intel Toolbox software which will tell you if your firmware is current and give you the option of updating it.

Where do you have this info from, except from a statement in an Intel FW readme.
See the posts in the Intel forum:
Anyone else had a repeat 8mb brick on 320 ssd AFTER firmware update

While not T60 in size, I bought Crucial C300 for the X60 Tablet and it performs and works perfectly. It is reasonably priced also.

Or if you're not after storage capacity, go for Intel X25-E which could be found in ebay for reasonable price. They still have warranty left. I'm not sure they can be bought new anymore.

lophiomys wrote:Where do you have this info from, except from a statement in an Intel FW readme.
See the posts in the Intel forum:
Anyone else had a repeat 8mb brick on 320 ssd AFTER firmware update

Thank you very much for the link to the ongoing "8MB" bug saga.
I had seen numerous news items about the firmware fix but no news items that said that the problem was still occuring.
Guess it's time to go do another backup of my wife's 120GB 320 Series SSD !!

I read that the 8mb bug was fixed in august 2011. Are you saying it's not?

Check out the posts in the Intel SSD Forum, especially the one I linked to above.

The last negative post re the Intel 320 was posted on Feb 2 2012 on the Intel forum- problem still exists ? Is this why newegg was selling them for $69 ?


















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ajkula66 wrote:The only thing I'd have to add would be this: if you're looking into going the SSD route, consider the move to W7 from XP as well.

I've played with a variety of tweaks on different SSDs in XP and was not pleased overall. While I have my gripes with W7, it runs much smoother on SSD and any T6x unit is powerful enough to handle that OS properly.

Intel would get my vote, haven't tried Samsung yet.

My $0.02 only...

What are the issues in running XP on an SSD? Are they above and beyond the issues in running XP on a HD? Upgrading to Win7 on my T60 would probably double the cost of going the SSD route.

I've had random freezing or a total slowdown to a crawl quite often...even after all the recommended tweaks. Well beyond the pain of running it on a conventional drive.

If you know what you're doing, a W7 upgrade doesn't have to be an expensive one - I'm not suggesting using pirated software here - but that's all that I'm going to say...

Good luck.

retired wrote:The last negative post re the Intel 320 was posted on Feb 2 2012 on the Intel forum- problem still exists ? Is this why newegg was selling them for $69 ?

My bet is that they were selling them for $69 because the next generation of Intel drives is hitting retail channels and the market value of the 320 (which is a four year old controller) will be pretty low.

I wouldn't worry too much about the forum posts. Don't yank the power without shutting your machine down, and my bet is you'll be fine.

I very recently (little over a week ago) upgraded to a Kingston SSDNow 128GB SSD and am very pleased with the results. I managed to get a great deal for mine at $125, so it made the upgrade all that sweeter. My system is across-the-board much more responsive now as a result of the upgrade. Kingston might not be the fastest SSD on the market, but it's making a huge improvement in my T61's performance.

Here's what I learned in the process:

1) Windows 7 does not automatically identify and format the drive. I had to use a Vista repair disk to format my drive, as Win 7 hung when I tried to do a system restore with formatting. I had the same problem with my Dell XT when I upgraded to an SSD in that a month ago. If you're using XP, you probably won't have that problem. Which leads me to...

2) I recommend a fresh Windows 7 install over XP any day. Win 7 recognizes the SSD and sets the hard disk parameters accordingly, while XP doesn't have the cahones to identify the differences.

While the system restore route worked for my Dell once I formatted the drive, it did not for my T61. The result was my backup was a little useless. Lucky for me all my files were still on the hard drive I upgraded from.

3) Once you're up and running again, there are some things to do to optimize your system performance. Check here: http://thessdreview.com/ssd-guides/opti ... n-guide-2/ Like it says in the guide, you don't have to do anything, but I did and discovered the ones that worked best for me were:

• * Disable System restore (I do regular backups anyway)

• * Disable the indexing service

• * Disable drive defragmentation

• * Disable Windows Search

• * ~Specific to Lenovo~ I did not install and configure the hard drive "air bag" active protection system since SSDs have no moving parts. This saved some disk space and the running process it requires.

What didn't work for me:

• * Disable prefetch (slowed my system down a lot, back to regular hard drive speeds)

• * Disable write-cache buffer flushing (same as prefetch, above)

4) I highly recommend the SSD Tweaker (http://elpamsoft.com/Downloads.aspx?Name=SSD%20Tweaker) tool - it's worth the $12.99 for the pro version, as it provides TRIM optimization. Windows 7 does that itself, but I found if you do a lot of disk-intensive tasks, like benchmarking your new drive too much, it can slow your system down.

Hope this helps - upgrading to SSDs was the best performance boost I've seen in my two laptops, although replacing my T7300 CPU with a T9300 was pretty awesome and took less time!

I'd skip the "tweak guides", as most of those were written for the first generation of JMicron drives that had truly abysmal random write performance.

Defrag is about the only feature that I can think of that's truly useless on SSDs. The rest of the stuff... well... it might make your SSD-equipped laptop seem ever-so-slightly faster (but probably not significantly,) but it does so at the cost of functionality. Not to mention, it would make a laptop with a conventional drive seem faster -- there's simply less disk access.

ajkula66 wrote:The only thing I'd have to add would be this: if you're looking into going the SSD route, consider the move to W7 from XP as well.

I've played with a variety of tweaks on different SSDs in XP and was not pleased overall. While I have my gripes with W7, it runs much smoother on SSD and any T6x unit is powerful enough to handle that OS properly.

Intel would get my vote, haven't tried Samsung yet.

My $0.02 only...

I run XP on my T60 with a SSD... I have no complains. Once in a while I run the garbage wiper tool (freeware tool from OCZ), which manually start to trim the SSD. TRIM keeps the SSD performance in shape. Win7 does this automatically... as far as I know this is the only advantage of Win7 regarding the SSD.

I've had Win7 on my T60p config (T7600, 2GB, same SSD), but in my memory it was a little less smooth as on XP. Off course I have no hard evidence to confirm this