Thinkpads Forum

Finally got my hands on a Samsung Spinpoint M1 500Gb 5400RPMr 2.5" 9.5mm drive from OWC and installed in in my X61s. This is the first and only currently available 2.5" drive that will fit a Thinkpad. The currently available Hitachi 500Gb drive is a 12mm drive, and will not fit in most standard laptops given its height.

My 320Gb was getting pretty full (I like to carry my entire music library and plenty of video clips/TV shows) when I travel.

Had to buy this Samsung drive inside an external drive shell-only way OWC (or anyone else is selling them for that matter) right now for $309 plus shipping. Drive came out of the shell easily.

Used Acronis Image cloner to duplicate the drive and the new drive is working like a charm with plenty of room to spare.

Performance appears to be on par with most 5400rpm laptop drives I've used in my Thinkpads. I tend to go for capacity more than speed.

oooooh nice. One thing I wanted to know is how much usable space do you have. I've been trying to come up with (via my flawed mathematical skills ) some way to determine this...so far I came up with 450-480gig.

Wonder when us aussies will be able to get our hands on this....

well yeah, it's probably 460GB. My 400GB HDD (not laptop one) only gives 379GB (actual storage) so yeah a 500 should be about that range.

Congrats though, i'd don't see myself needing that much though I usually bring what i want, not everything.

SHoTTa35 wrote:well yeah, it's probably 460GB. My 400GB HDD (not laptop one) only gives 379GB (actual storage) so yeah a 500 should be about that range.

Congrats though, i'd don't see myself needing that much though I usually bring what i want, not everything.

Actually the 500Gb drive netted 461Gb. I don't really need that much right now, but its nice to have the additional head room and free space to minimize fragmentation and maintain performance.

320Gb was great, but this should hold me for a long while.

Looks like one store around here (Umart) appears to have them for AUD$265. They're also listing a 400gb model ($235). Both need to be preordered with an apparent wait time of 2 days.

Will probably wait until the price drops a bit.

shfawaz wrote:Actually the 500Gb drive netted 461Gb.

500GB binary converts to 465.66GB decimal.   i wonder where the other 4GB went.

hmmm... hidden partition? OS detection accuracy? (don't rly know if windows does this but does it hide the space it takes up in actions such as paging file allocations/caching?). Maybe Samsung weren't entirely uh truthful on putting the entire 500gig in lol...

Someone is stealing your gigabytes!!!!!

Partitioning, formatting, spare clusters for bad sectors and other sundries like the MFT. It's only a 1% overhead.

I'd be more bothered about the manufacturers calculating in decimal rather than binary to make their drives look bigger!

The directory.

LOL!

500GB is ...

- 2.5 times that which I have on my X61 (and I'm running 3 OSes on it) and still have so much free space I don't know what to do with it...

- 2x my 2 backup drives on which I keep a copy of my photos, files, some programs, etc

.... and you filled up a 320GB? Yowie!! hehe

Hi shfawaz,
Could you post the exact model reference of the drive?
I will try to find it in Singapore.
Cheers,
Alex

Very nice,
I'm looking to buy the same exact drive for my TZ. The Tz can take dual harddrive, one 1.8" and one 2.5"
I already have a 1.8" 32GB Sandisk SSD with OS installed in there, so it would be nice to add this 500gb Samsung harddrive for storage purposes.
Imagine that, 532GB (unformatted, of course ) total in a machine that has a screen size of 11.1"
Can you give me some additional information about how fast the drive is, in case I may want to dual boot another OS on the Samsung drive?
Thanks in advance

OH and to answer carrausse's question, the model number of the drive is HDSMHM500LI
Gook luck finding it

cool man
500 gb