Thinkpads Forum

After many years with an R61 I finally gave up on it as my primary laptop. It ran Win7 Pro 64 bit decently, but there are only so many times that I wanted to pull the fan assembly to clean the fins, the spindle, and the bushing, and lubricate and re-install it. Over the years I have had to do that more often each year. I bought a super-clean T520 at what I considered a reasonable price, and I like it a great deal. Every time I upgrade to a newer Thinkpad I get a bigger, brighter, higher resolution display, along with improvements like a faster CPU and more RAM. Now that I have a UEFI Thinkpad I need to buy a 4TB hard drive to replace the 1TB C: and the Ultrabay 2TB D:. That will put an end to swapping the HD carrier and the optical drive in the Ultrabay.

One unexpected advantage to this T520 has been a big help in a work project, where I have been moving the studios for a cluster of seven radio stations. The automation systems used by the stations have not had a thorough hardware checkout and calibration since they were new more than a decade ago. To do that work I need all four of the USB ports on the T520 to service the specialized I/O interface connected to the PC running the automation software. The Logitech mouse dongle occupies the back port. I need one port for the Behringer UMC202HD USB audio interface that I use to generate and analyze audio signals. The I/O interface gets controlled by the T520 with a USB cable and an RS-232 cable (which is connected to one of my RS-232-to-USB adapters since the RS-232 implementation in the I/O interface uses only three wires) occupying the last two ports.

Congratulations on your "new" machine. It's surely quite a jump from a R61.

The only issue I see with your comment is the hard drive: I doubt there is a 9.5mm drive with 4TB capacity. The large 2.5" drives tend to be 15mm tall and will not fit into the regular caddy. There is some possibility that the 15mm will still fit in the T520 hard drive bay. I've got a W530 (T520/T530 W520/W530 share the same basic chassis design) and, last time I took at look in there, it seemed like a taller drive might fit.

To keep your machine snappy I'd add an mSATA drive and boot from there. This way you'd only use the hard drive for storage.

I would still face the need for at least 3TB of hard drive, and preferably 4TB for future needs. Putting my genealogical reference library in the cloud is not practical - many items are more than 300 mB PDFs that are difficult to navigate in the cloud. I may have to bite the bullet and eventually go to a second 2 TB drive internally.

The T520 officially supports hard drives with a maximum height of 9.5mm. Even if there's enough space for a 15mm height hard drive, it usually means installing the drive without the rubber rails which isn't a good idea-- the rubber rails protect the hard drive from excessive physical shock and vibration, and removing them can shorten the drive's lifespan.

High capacity SSDs are another albeit pricey option.
Unlike T420 most T520 I've seen do not come with an eSATA port, but some of the docks have that port on the back, it's another option to get more high speed storage.

TPFanatic wrote: ↑

Mon May 02, 2022 10:25 pm

Unlike T420 most T520 I've seen do not come with an eSATA port...

Any kind of external storage is not a viable option for me. It looks like I will go for a 3TB drive so I can leave the optical drive in the expansion bay.

4TB is a lot of internal capacity for a laptop, even today.

I'm not aware of any non spinning drive of that capacity in the 2.5" format, but if money is not a problem, then maybe you can buy this adapter to join two M.2 into a single SATA drive via RAID:

https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/25s22m2ngffr

Another option is to add an SD card. I've got a 512GB one in my W530.

mSATA is also an option, but it's been a while since they discontinued them and not sure if you can still get large ones.

Staring yourself blind on an internal CD/DVD drive is so yesterday!
Get an external USB optical, and put e.g. this HDD/SSD adapter in your Ultrabay.

mikemex wrote: ↑

Tue May 03, 2022 10:33 pm

... but if money is not a problem ...

Ah, but it is a problem.

RealBlackStuff wrote: ↑

Wed May 04, 2022 1:39 am

Get an external USB optical, and put e.g. this HDD/SSD adapter in your Ultrabay.

I already have a 2 TB drive in my ultrabay as I stated in my first post in this thread.

Thank you for the suggestions, everybody, but since there is no 4 TB drive to go in the main drive bay I will thank you all and unsub this thread.

Samsung makes an 8TB 2.5" SSD. https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/me ... 7q8t0b-am/

I wouldn't pay $800 for it now, I'd buy it for $20 in 10 years.

As for internal vs external storage, you may get away with velcroing external storage onto your lid.

TPFanatic wrote: ↑

Wed May 04, 2022 10:03 am

Samsung makes an 8TB 2.5" SSD. https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/me ... 7q8t0b-am/

I wouldn't pay $800 for it now, I'd buy it for $20 in 10 years.

Assuming you don't get cancer during that time.

And I don't think prices are going to drop that much. There is a hard limit to the physics behind our electronic devices. It's a textbook example of the diminishing returns and we're on the wrong side of it.