Thinkpads Forum

What do I need to look for if I want to get an SSD for my T520?
And what are your recommendations? I'll go reasonably high-end, but don't want to go crazy expensive.
Thanks in advance!

If you don't need WWAN, the msata drive might be worth a look. It's probably a bit more expensive per GB than other SSDs, but then you can keep a standard drive in the bay for storage and use the msata for the boot drive. If that doesn't work you could look for a smaller SSD for the main bay and use the modular caddy too add a drive to the optical bay. Lastly, if you want to use a single drive, the Momentus XT is worth a look too. It's a regular drive with a 4GB flash drive attached. It gives just short of SSD like performance, and can speed up boot times and application launch times, but it's cheaper and you get more space, though the biggest size is 500GB.

Thanks, Fred.
Reading this thread on another forum with detailed info about it:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo- ... rimer.html
The MSATA setup sounds great, but what worries me is the initial impression that I'd have to start with a clean install of W7 instead of using a chosen method to copy what I currently have over.
To my surprise, I've come to appreciate the Lenovo setup, where the "install disks' are essentially already on the HDD. If I moved to the MSATA bootdisk setup, one would probably want to put the "install disk" back-up OS on the SATA HDD and the actually operating OS on the MSATA.
Anyone have any thoughts on these things?

I don't know much about the recovery discs. When I get a new machine I usually make the recovery discs, then do a clean install with just the drivers and tweaks I make. I make an image of that and use it if I need to re-install. My thought on the recovery discs would be whether they set the SSD alignment correctly, which you need for the best performance. Since I don't use them, I can't say. If you're interested in doing a clean install, you can download a disc here.

I didn't know you could do a "clean install" from the recovery disk.
But I always do so much work on the machine after getting it that, very quickly, I get to the state where I'd very much like NOT to have to do it again.
And I'm at that stage now.
So I don't want a clean install, I want to be able to put what I have on the HDD now on the MSATA SDD.
Lenovo basically puts the entire OS package on the disk, though - and THAT is what I've come to appreciate, and would want to keep (so if you want to install a part of the OS that wasn't installed, you just pull it up off of the disk). But I'd want to move that to the HDD after putting my current system, as is, tweaks and adjustments and configurations and all, on the SDD.
Aligned.
I need to know that I'll be able to do that, and HOW to do that, before I go ahead with this (which I'm eager to do)!

A clean install implies Windows and nothing else. The recovery discs will put your machine back to its factory state, which is not a clean install because it has all of the Thinkvantage software.

Ah, ok.
But that would require a copy of the OS w/ license in addition to what came on the machine, right?
No way to do that with what Lenovo provides, as I understand it.

Alright:

You need to decide how much space you're going to be using on the SSD. 60 GB is probably too small, and so you should shoot for a drive that has 120 GB or more of space on it.

Other than that, get a SATA III-based drive (6 GB/s) since they perform quite a bit better than their SATA II counterparts (and are about as expensive).

For best performance, get a SandForce-based (SF-2281) drive. The exceptions are the Crucial M4 and the Intel 510 though they both fall before SandForce drives in most areas.

Beyond that, the only limiting factor is price. Usually more expensive drives will perform better than their counterparts- but that's not always the case.

But since you indicated that you're going reasonably high-end I'd recommend the OCZ Vertex 3 (MAX IOPS is a bit faster but it's not worth the extra 50 on top).

Q-Ball, thanks. That's appears to be an 2.5 SSD, not an msata, right?

Noteworthy info.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd ... 923-9.html