Thinkpads Forum

Hello,
I purchased a T530 in June 2009 and it is working well to this day, passed on to my husband in January 2010 who usually doesn't look after things very well.

In the meantime my company bought me a Toshiba, which I used for about a year, just not enough grunt. It's still working.

Finally, I convinced my company to spend $3000+ for a T530 with 16 Gb RAM and a 250 SSD on 15 March 2013. By 15 April 2013, the SSD had a total and complete failure; the story I heard through our tech team was that a failure/error on the motherboard caused the SSD to fail. Both the motherboard and SSD were replaced in April.

In mid July right before a 3 week trip to the US, I started to get CMOS errors when I booted up or when I plugged into a power outlet. Because of the previous failure of the motherboard, I have been careful to only use a powerboard with a surge protector, except for one time at a hotel a week or so before the CMOS errors. I basically would reset the clock and then everything would be fine.

On 5 August, the SSD had a total and complete failure again.

Is there something wrong with the build of this laptop? Are SSD's not reliable yet?

Any advice to avoid having to get a new motherboard and SSD every 2-3 months?

Thanks.
Kathleen

I don't there's anything wrong with the T530 or SSDs per se, at least not in my experience. It sounds like you got a lemon. Lenovo makes a lot of notebooks and they mostly work well, but every once in a while, one come out of the factory that's a problem child for whatever reason. There's a short somewhere, it's not seated properly, something is not connected properly, your guess is as good as mine. You might want to address why your motherboard is goofy and your SSDs keeps failing with Lenovo staff. I mean if it's fixed, it should be working properly, right? If you're not making any headway there, you may want to PM Mark over on the Lenovo forums. He might be able to get to the bottom of the situation. Good luck and welcome to TPF. I wish we'd met under better circumstances.

Thanks, ZaZ.