Thinkpads Forum

I have T60 with type 8744-5bu and I am thinking of upgrading few items , wanted to find out what brand is recomended :-

a) Laptop has 2 gb of ram with both dimms filled , can I do two 2gb dimms for max of 4gb or that will not work .
b) Looking to upgrading the hd to ssd harddrive , whats the maximum I can use. At the moment HD is 120GB which is 5400 rpm and quite slow ..... Is there a need for my to buy a HD caddy for SSD or no

carguy10 wrote:I have T60 with type 8744-5bu and I am thinking of upgrading few items , wanted to find out what brand is recomended :-

a) Laptop has 2 gb of ram with both dimms filled , can I do two 2gb dimms for max of 4gb or that will not work .
b) Looking to upgrading the hd to ssd harddrive , whats the maximum I can use. At the moment HD is 120GB which is 5400 rpm and quite slow ..... Is there a need for my to buy a HD caddy for SSD or no

You can install 4GB, but I believe only 3GB will be utilized.

As an alternative to SSD, you might want to look at the WD Scorpio Black 500GB. It's a great, capacious, and speedy drive.

Will the laptop support 500GB , on lenovo site it says " •Standard 40GB, 60GB, 80GB, 100GB, or 120GB hard drive sizes ". If I install 4gb and the OS is 64 bit , it should be able to see all 4gb unless its the chipset limitation ..

It will "see" 4GB but utilize only 3GB due to the chipset limitation and regardless of OS.

There is no known size limit for hard drives in T60/p - Lenovo site just states what they've originally shipped with, and back in those days 500GB was simply not an option.

I've ran 500GB/7200rpm Samsungs in several T60/p machines, no issues.

I've got the 7200 RPM 500GB Scorpio Black in my T60P, and it runs beautifully.

I run WD Scorpio black 750gb 7200rpm and instead of optical, second WD Scorpio blue 500gb 5400rpm for personal stuff. Both run great ( I'm use win 7 and xp in dual boot mode).

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Those 500GB drives are nice "most bang for your buck" options and will offer a little performance upgrade compared to your 5400rpm disk... But for a mayor speed upgrade you definitely should upgrade to a SSD. You won't regret it

Backslashnl1 wrote:Those 500GB drives are nice "most bang for your buck" options and will offer a little performance upgrade compared to your 5400rpm disk... But for a mayor speed upgrade you definitely should upgrade to a SSD. You won't regret it

But at what price, what have you found?

If I was going to buy a SSD today I would go for the Crucial m4 CT128M4SSD2 128GB.
Fast, reliable and good priced. It also comes in 64GB, 256GB and 512GB.

What OS are you running?

I you go for an SSD make sure the OS supports this (properly). I went from XP and HDD to Win 7 and SSD.
Boot up time improved by about a factor 6! And no noice or lock-ups from the harddrive anymore. Simply love it.

I made a blog post about the upgrade I made to my t60. Perhaps you can find it useful:
http://turbohjelm.blogspot.com/

You want it to fly, run Linux. My R60e boots in seven seconds.

My experience with XP was the opposite. It's much lighter weight than 7. When I upgraded my desktop, 7 seemed slower than XP.

HalliHallo wrote:What OS are you running?

I you go for an SSD make sure the OS supports this (properly). I went from XP and HDD to Win 7 and SSD.
Boot up time improved by about a factor 6! And no noice or lock-ups from the harddrive anymore. Simply love it./

Frankly after upgrading from XP with a 250GB HD to a Win7 w/an Intel SSD I can't ever see going back to a hard drive. The difference is night and day. You just get accustomed to the speed and responsiveness. Its not really all that expensive either. Probably the most cost effective way is get a student edition of Win 7 ($29). Buy a small size SSD (32 or 40GB - you'll only keep your OS and programs on it. Price, quality and reliability vary. You can get a 80gb Intel 320 SSD online for as low as $80 w/5 year warranty) and then use your 120gb HD in the bay for storage (assuming it isn't on last legs).

Of course prudence dictates that one should always make backups or images of their OS. This is especially true with SSD's as unlike HD's when they go they give no prior warning. That said I haven't had a single problem with my SSD yet.

smw6230 wrote:
Frankly after upgrading from XP with a 250GB HD to a Win7 w/an Intel SSD I can't ever see going back to a hard drive. The difference is night and day. You just get accustomed to the speed and responsiveness.

Hear hear!

smw6230 wrote: Of course prudence dictates that one should always make backups or images of their OS. This is especially true with SSD's as unlike HD's when they go they give no prior warning. That said I haven't had a single problem with my SSD yet.

True that... :/