Thinkpads Forum

can anyone tell if any of these would work inside my T61 ?

if not, is there a suggested drive? am currently using a 100gb Hitachi

while asking about it, is there a solid state drive solution for the older T40, T42 machines?

thanks

[quote="henni[/quote]

The 80 gig Intel (SSD 80G|INTEL SSDSA2MH080G1) is faster than all git out with a Windows 7 score of 7+ for the hard drive on my high end HP lappy. The OCz 60 gig is -pretty- fast, but not as quick as the Intel units. My T60s run 6+ for the hard drive reading on Windows 7.

80 gig size is plenty for the operating system and Documents. Multimedia files are on my mechanical Ultra Bay drive.

Turn off superfetch, prefetch and defrag. Ignore all other bad advice on the 'net about disabling indexing, virtual memory, etc. That's dumb thinking with no good reasoning behind it.

There are some PATA SSDs out there, but not easy to find.

ok, so you recommend INTEL SSDSA2MH080G1 for my T61 ?

or, did I see a mention about a Hewlett-Packard HP laptop in your reply ?

if HP, what do you suggest for T61 ?

Today only: Special at Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Special/ShellShocker.aspx?
$239.99 for an Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH080G2R5 2.5" 80GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail

henni wrote:ok, so you recommend INTEL SSDSA2MH080G1 for my T61 ?

or, did I see a mention about a Hewlett-Packard HP laptop in your reply ?

if HP, what do you suggest for T61 ?

I assumed you noticed my sig that states solid state drives on my T60s, but yes, I am using the Intel 80 gig drives on three T60 machines with very good results. Hard drive Experience Index using Windows 7 is 6.7 for those machines. They are limited by Mother Board SATA speed restrictions by design, but 6.7 is still really darned good.

Is THIS the same drive and will it also work with a T61?

(click on embedded link)

henni wrote:Is THIS the same drive and will it also work with a T61?

(click on embedded link)

I see no reason why it would not work. In addition, that drive has the adapter to make it fit properly so the contacts will mate with the SATA socket. That's the black metal thingy surrounding the actual drive. (otherwise some models are shorter than normal and one must cobble up a cardboard shim for proper fit)

Heck, I may visit Newegg and see if they have any of those Intel drives around 160 gig or more for my Ultra Bay!

I run the 80GB intel x25-m g2 in my T60 on Windows 7. Was thinking of upgrading CPU, but after reading everything, all signs point to HD as bottleneck. Indeed going from 5400 RPM to SSD is ridiculously fast. Installation just zipped by, boot time, shutodwn, unzipping, anything that need access to HD is ridiculously fast. Get the G2 if you going SSD as it has TRIM support that will aid in keeping performance top notch over the long haul. I play games which load maps and on my old HD, it would show on the title bar "Not Responding" due to the lag, but with the SSD it just zips by. It feels like a whole new machine.

That's interesting. I had the the Samsung SLC SSD. While it's not as fast as the Intel drive, its 100MBps max speed is close to the SATA controller limit on the T60/R60. I did find boot times were a bit faster, and some slower opening apps like iTunes or Photoshop seemed to open a little quicker, but on the whole it did not seem much faster than the 7200RPM I have now. I thought about picking up the X25-M and getting the 1TB WD to throw in the ultrabay. Given my experience with the Samsung SSD, I'm not sure whether it's "worth it" to spend a lot of money and give up a lot of capacity for a marginal increase in performance. I don't know, maybe the Intel drive is that much better.

Well I did tinker with it to get the optimal speed, changed the bios to AHCI, used the Intel Storage Matrix System driver, disable page file, disable hibernation, disable index, disable prefetch. All said and done on my T60 with Windows 7 RTM, I'm able to do 70-80MB/s writes and 130-140MB/s reads. But the real benefit is seek time which I think is on scale of 80x faster than my 5400 rpm drive. I don't know how the intel compares to the samsung, so your miles may vary. Office application open in a second, my boot time is maybe 15s, shutdown maybe 2-3s. Then again I keep my system relatively clean. FYI, my Windows score on disk performance is 7.2, if you want a comparison.

I did all that too. I tried it with both Vista and XP with similar results. I don't know I guess for all the hype they've gotten as performance enhancers I expected a little more spring in the step. Most things I do other than the couple I mentioned were already pretty quick on a 7200RPM drive. Opening a FF page or Word doc did not seem much faster, maybe one second on a SSD versus two on a platter drive. When you consider the cost and the space you give up, I did not seem like a value proposition to me. Maybe if I had one of the newer SATA II system it would be a different story. SSDs do have some other positives. I noticed an uptick in battery life, though for me it's not a big deal, but probably is for others. They run cooler and the no moving parts is nice for those who need reliable storage.

I'm running the Intel X-25m G2 160GB in a T61 with Windows 7 x64.. Windows Experience Rating is 7.2.

Let me put it this way... This is the single most important upgrade you can do to your computer if you already have at least 1GB of ram. (I've got 6GB of ram and have also turned off the pagefile.)