Anyone try Crucial m4 *mSATA* SSD in W520?

[davidhbrown]

Has anyone tried Crucial's mSATA SSD in a W520? I'd presume it would work, but their compatibility checker doesn't list it as compatible with any of the Lenovo Thinkpad W5[23]0 machines. Obviously, it's not going to get full speed in the slot, but I just keep needing more storage on my primary drive (currently at 128GB).

[wolfman]

Thanks David for posting about this, I'm interested in this too as I've been hoping for a larger than 80-120gb option from a major player (Crucial, Samsung, Intel) to become available. This looks like a good deal price wise as well...

[jcvjcvjcvjcv]

I guess I'll find that out at the end of this week. I have the 256 GB mSata M4 on order. It will go directly in my W520. Followed by the fastest way to get rid of all the bloatware: a format of the HDD.

[wolfman]

Awesome - please let us know how you make out!

[jcvjcvjcvjcv]

I will

Order was canceled by shop; their supplier couldn't get it. Ordered somewhere else. Hopefully I'll still have it this week.

At the German webshop Alternate there is one "review" from someone who uses this SSD in a X220 without problems:

http://www.alternate.de/html/product/Cr ... B/1006304/?

[jcvjcvjcvjcv]

It was shipped today, should arrive tomorrow.

Tomorrow a workday of nett 10:30 hours and Thursday work until 4PM, so it will probably Thursday late afternoon before I can try it out.

[jcvjcvjcvjcv]

It's up and running. WEI score for primary storage sits at 7.8

OS is installed on a partition that eats up the entire SSD (minus the other small partitions that Windows creates).

[wolfman]

Awesome, thanks for sharing, glad to know it works well in the W520.

[davidhbrown]

Thank; just dropped to 7.68GB free on my 128GB mSATA SSD today (with 120/640 free on my HDD). Oh; turns out I've 23GB of tmp files from Firefox failed downloads or something, so I guess I can hold off a while yet, but it sure was nice to come here and see your post, jcv.

Hmm... my RunCore SSD is doing only 7.3 on the WEI...

[JBuzzard]

My thanks for posting on these as well. I'm looking at upgrading to it from a OCZ Nocti although I found once I turned off RAM paging and the hibernation file I have a fair bit of space left on the C: mSATA drive.

I'm fairly sure the mSATA slot on the W520's I have is only SATA II and therefore the M4 SSD will drop down to that 3Gbs speed when installed. Does anyone know if the W530's mSATA slot is SATA III rather than II?

And does the Crucial M4 mSATA drive have the same controller as the 2.5" version? I think this is a Marvell 9174 or something close to that, correct?

My laptop drives are all encrypted with TrueCrypt do performance with random data is critical and Sandforce controllers seem (according to reviews at least) to take a major hit with random data.

[jcvjcvjcvjcv]

Both W520 and W530 have SATA II in the mSata slot.

The two SATA III connections the chipset provides are connected to the main storage bay and the ultrabay.

In the real world only the performance of sequential read/write of huge files is affected = no performance difference.

Still have to do a benchmark with AC plugged in

[davidhbrown]

I did decide to get this drive and decided to take the opportunity to rebuild the system. I had started this system with just an Intel 80GB mSATA SSD, so I had all sorts of applications installed to the D: drive and most of the My <whatever> folders moved there too. Now I have room for all applications on the C: drive. Here's a benchmark for Crucial M4 SSD in mSATA slot as system drive with AC (summary: writes just under 250MB/s; reads just over 250MB/s):

[geoffrey]

Just a warning, folks, that it seems that the current firmware (01MG) shipped with new Crucial M4 mSATA drives (at least the 256Gb) is seriously buggy, causing frequent "2101 Detection Error" warnings for the drive on boot up, with subsequent failure to boot until a full (20minute - 1hour) power cycle is completed.

I bought one of these a week ago to do a clean install of Windows 8 with my W520. I formatted it as GPT, and everything went fine for a couple of days until about five reboots down the line I got a 2101 Detection Error on boot up. This had me very scared, as I'd moved over a lot of data from a different drive in order to make room on the second drive for regular image-based backups (ironically enough). Stupid I know. Fortunately I still had Windows 7 on the other drive, which I could boot in order to research the problem. Came up with a few mentions, and decided to try power off with battery out. Sure enough, after an hour off with no battery, the system booted up again from the mSATA drive. Phew. I immediately backed up all "crucial" (ha ha) data. Warning, folks, never, ever, trust in a new drive until it is well tested, and even then make sure you've not only backed up your data, but you have a second backup in case the first backup fails.

Right, a couple more days of fast, responsive operation and then one night on reboot, WHAM "2101 Detection Error on HDD2 (mSATA)". Great. It was bedtime anyway, so I leave the system off with the battery out all night, but in the morning the error persists and the system won't boot. As it happens, I had been fiddling with BIOS settings, so I wondered whether I’d mucked something up. I went into the BIOS, pressed F9 to load defaults, F10 to save and reboot. Pressed F12 during reboot so I could select the mSATA drive, and hey presto, up it boots. WTF?

Think no more about it till last nght, exactly the same problem. “Right, I know how to fix this,” I thought. Went straight into BIOS, reset it. Restarted. “2101 Detection Error”. So off, battery out, wait 10 minutes (I’m impatient), back into BIOS, reload defaults again, this time decide to spend some time in the BIOS putting it back to my usual settings. Spent about 10 minutes doing that. Restarted, and the drive boots again as if nothing had happened.

So this morning I went to the Crucial forums (why didn’t I look there before? – I’d been looking on Lenovo sites, thinking the problem was the Lenovo firmware), and I’ve found lots and lots of reports of the exact same issue on a number of different systems, not just Lenovo, mostly with the 2.5” M4, which has firmware 010G, and some specifically with the mSATA 01MG. The firmware is basically the same. It seems the previous firmware for the 2.5” M4 was fine, but when people upgraded to 010G (which offered performance improvements) they started getting this error, although Mac users had the error on earlier firmware too. Some people have returned their drives, and others have tried to downgrade with mixed success. Others are waiting for a promised fix from Crucial. My drive was *shipped* with 01MG already on it -- I haven't flashed it.

Crucial have a post where they recommend letting the machine idle in the BIOS setup for 20 mins, then repeating this twice over, for a full hour, to fix the issue temporarily!!!!!!!! I can’t believe they’re seriously recommending such a procedure for a serious product. Clearly it’s a workaround – apparently the drive does some sort of internal self check during this time, and needs to be powered on with no attempt at data access.

I haven’t yet decided whether to return mine as unfit for purpose (a real pain, due to all the time I’ve put into setting up Win8 the way I want it), or to wait for a firmware update. But I thought I should warn you guys of the issue.

[davidhbrown]

Thank you for your post, Geoffrey, and sorry for your troubles.

Buried in the "guide" for the firmware update, it mentions that you can check your current firmware by looking the the device manager properties for the drive under hardware IDs. The firmware appears after a series of underscores. Mine is IDE\DiskM4-CT256M4SSD3__________________________000F____ and it sounds like that "000F" will stay there for a while.

[YW-Slayer]

Just remembered this thread due to a review of mSATA SSDs on Tom's: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/msa ... ,3286.html

Am considering picking up a 256GB Crucial m4 mSATA to replace my Intel 310 80GB, but has the new firmware version 04MH (http://www.crucial.com/help/ssd/index.aspx?source=web) solved these problems? I can stick with the Intel, since this is my work computer and I prefer stability over speed, and I also just disabled Hibernate and have enough space on C:, but am just wondering.

[ZaZ]

I doubt there's much of a discrernable difference between the Intel and Crucial for most uses.

[davidhbrown]

I had not noticed the firmware available for the m4, but it doesn't sound like there's anything too tempting such that I'll find out if it is better/worse.

If you really, truly have enough space on your C: drive, you might as well stick with the Intel. I have two left over from earlier upgrades (one acquired as a spare) and I've been repurposing them (and a 128GB mSATA SSD I bought when I first needed more space) when I can with mSATA - SATA adapter caddies. One is in a tiny notebook I bought for taking to class; another is in an old Dell running Windows 8 just to see how awful that would be. They definitely aren't as zippy as the m4 in the W520, but they're good.

I noticed that mushkin has announced a 480GB mSATA SSD... maybe if I ever spring the 5 bills for that one, I'll try upgrading the m4 firmware!

[YW-Slayer]

Fair enough. There are other things I can spend my money on anyway.

[Jakoob]

I flashed the new firmware 040H to my 7mm M4 on T500 sometime before Christmas, since then it works without any problems... I think this is finally stable version.

[holoman5]

"I noticed that mushkin has announced a 480GB mSATA SSD... maybe if I ever spring the 5 bills for that one, I'll try upgrading the m4 firmware!"

With latest bios. I have installed up to Crucial 960GB mSata. no isues at all. Boots to Win 8.1 Enterprise in 4 seconds!

[jcvjcvjcvjcv]

"I noticed that mushkin has announced a 480GB mSATA SSD... maybe if I ever spring the 5 bills for that one, I'll try upgrading the m4 firmware!"

With latest bios. I have installed up to Crucial 960GB mSata. no isues at all. Boots to Win 8.1 Enterprise in 4 seconds!

Where you got that? Crucial only seems to know of mSata stuff up to 512 GB.

[jdrou]

Where you got that? Crucial only seems to know of mSata stuff up to 512 GB.

Only mSATA larger than 512MB I see on NewEgg is the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB.

It's possible they have larger drives that are only available to large OEMs right now but I would expect to at least see some evidence of them.