Thinkpads Forum

Recently just got my T420 was thinking of change a larger capacity SSD, will be appreciate for any advice.

Thank you!

Any 2.5" SSD will be fine. Get one that's 9.5mm high for best results.

(I believe OCZ's fixed the issue with the Vertex 3's lids, so that should be fine as well- I don't know of reports that state problems with it and the T420 but I've seen problems with it and the W520/T520 chassis)

If you don't need WWAN, then the msata drive might be an option. You could use the msata drive as a boot drive for speed, then a regular hard drive for storage.

I grabbed a 320 series 120GB intel SSD.

blazing fast. maxes out the SATA bus for the most part. not too much more expensive than either the 80gb mSATA or 80gb normal intel.

Depends on your needs. if intel had made a 25nm mSATA device in a bigger than 80gb capacity, i'd have gone for it.

Recently also heart of the Renice 25nm x3 mSATA, i guess this one must have a price advantage than intel, just not sure how much would the capacity be in large.

I should add, since it's a laptop, dont buy for the controller, buy for the power draw. Intel drives barely ever draw more than 0.2 watts and are blazing fast.
Some of the "laptop sized" ssd's draw more than 5 watts. and a few even draw >1 idle.

blackomegax wrote:I should add, since it's a laptop, dont buy for the controller, buy for the power draw. Intel drives barely ever draw more than 0.2 watts and are blazing fast.

While I too am a fan of the Intel SSDs, it's worth noting that they draw a heck of a lot more than 0.2 W under load. Like... an order of magnitude more. They're still great SSDs, but they're not *that* power efficient!

For a 120gb 320 series.
Power Consumption (Active)
150 mW Typical

Power Consumption (Idle)
100 mW Typical


For the 510 series 250gb
Power Consumption (Active)
0.38W (MobileMark 2007 Workload)

Power Consumption (Idle)
0.1W


Either less than 0.2 or less than 0.4, not order of magnitude.
Specs from Intel's info.

Those specs are wrong then.

Measured power consumption is considerably higher, on the order of 2W or so under load -- hence my comment.

blackomegax wrote:I grabbed a 320 series 120GB intel SSD.

blazing fast. maxes out the SATA bus for the most part. not too much more expensive than either the 80gb mSATA or 80gb normal intel.

Depends on your needs. if intel had made a 25nm mSATA device in a bigger than 80gb capacity, i'd have gone for it.

What kind of ROI are you getting from a >$225 HDD upgrade like that?

Bánh mì wrote: What kind of ROI are you getting from a >$225 HDD upgrade like that?

That depends on how much your time is worth.

No, renice mSATA use 34nm flash

My time is worth a lot but saving 5 mins per day is not a good reason to upgrade IMO. I'm curious what are you getting in terms of ROI? I mean faster bootup shaves say a min (gracious), snappier machine overall, bragging rights, etc. but what quantifiable difference is it making? What is your vocation (or avocation if using it for hobbies ie gaming, videos, music, etc.) and what is the dollar value this SSD brings o you? I want to upgrade too but need to hear some real life substantive reasons.

Those specs are from Intel themselves.
I trust them more than i trust a kill-a-watt. (ie, whatever is drawing 2 watts, might have more to do with the CPU load associated to whatever is causing heavy HDD activity)

blackomegax wrote:Those specs are from Intel themselves.
I trust them more than i trust a kill-a-watt. (ie, whatever is drawing 2 watts, might have more to do with the CPU load associated to whatever is causing heavy HDD activity)

A couple of different sources have measured the power consumption. It's consistently much more than the specs say.

Now either Intel's got a drive which is at least an order of magnitude more power efficient than every other hard drive produced in the last thirty years *and* several different testers have all measured the drive incorrectly yet arriving at similar numbers... or the specs are wrong.

I think I'll go with Occam on this one.

My time is worth a lot but saving 5 mins per day is not a good reason to upgrade IMO. I'm curious what are you getting in terms of ROI? I mean faster bootup shaves say a min (gracious), snappier machine overall, bragging rights, etc. but what quantifiable difference is it making? What is your vocation (or avocation if using it for hobbies ie gaming, videos, music, etc.) and what is the dollar value this SSD brings o you? I want to upgrade too but need to hear some real life substantive reasons.

Sure. Here're my reasons (obviously YMMV):

1) I do a lot of multi-tasking. Heavy multitasking can bring even the best mechanical drives to their knees. Good SSDs can keep up with little to no performance degradation.

2) I take my laptop with me as I travel about. Mechanical drives are sensitive to bumps and shocks. SSDs are not. That alone is a big plus.

3) I use my laptop a lot during the day. SSDs help battery life.

4) My workload is fairly IO intensive. I develop software for a living. Complex builds, virtual machines, etc. all put a heavy load on my drive, a lot of it random IO. Mechanical drives are pretty bad at servicing multiple outstanding random reads/writes. SSDs are really good at it.

5) As a side hobby I do some kernel hacking. This involves rebooting. I'm relatively new at kernel hacking, so this involves a *lot* of rebooting.

Thanks for your feedback on ROI. I basically do MSFT Office Apps, surf the web and store photos on my notebook when I'm not using it to "produce." Would you recommend going SSD?

Honestly no, unless your entire photo catalog can fit.

I'm fairly active as a photographer so my 100+gb of raw/jpg does not fit on my 120gb SSD.
I ghost it across 4-5 different spinny disks for reliability though.

Yeah, the one major gotcha with SSDs is that the price/GB is still high enough that if you have a massive photo/video collection you might want to hold off for a bit.

I'd say that if you can afford it, and if you don't need 100+ GB of storage, go with an SSD. Otherwise, wait until the prices drop.