Thinkpads Forum

I just picked an x230 up off of ebay. I wanted the 240 but with the feel of a 220 so the 230 was kind of a middle ground I guess. Anyway the plan is to upgrade the ram to 16 gigs and add a SSD in place of the HDD. Its a laptop that will mostly just see web browsing.

Anyway anything I need to look out for when getting the RAM, max specs, recommended brands or whatever? It seems crucial has pretty much made life easy on their website if I choose to go that route.

Lastly is the mSATA slower than the SATA drive? In other words if I place an SSD in the mSATA slot instead of putting it where the HDD is currently will I loose performance that way. I want to use the SSD as my main drive for speed purposes. If I can go that route I can add the mSATA and keep the 320gigs of HDD for space or I can use to boot windows. For the off chance that I would need the compatibility. This is going to be a linux machine and space really isnt going to be needed. So is the mSATA the way to go or is it going to be slower than the other option?

Thanks, I did do a little research here on the board and else where so I appreciate the help.

Just get more memory from a reputable brand and you should be fine.

The mSATA slot is SATA II because the Intel chipset only supports two connectors and Lenovo decided to use them elsewhere. While the throughput will be slower than a SATA III drive, it's the latency that makes SSDs faster for most uses. There the drives will be more or less equal.

ZaZ wrote:Just get more memory from a reputable brand and you should be fine.

The mSATA slot is SATA II because the Intel chipset only supports two connectors and Lenovo decided to use them elsewhere. While the throughput will be slower than a SATA III drive, it's the latency that makes SSDs faster for most uses. There the drives will be more or less equal.

I'll second this. Lenovo chose to direct the two SATA III channels to the 2.5" bay and the ultrabase connector.

That said, I'd also readily recommend the mSATA. Unless you have a very specific need where maximum throughput is essential, the tradeoff of having your 2.5" bay free is well worth it. For your regular day to day usage you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between a SATA II mSATA SSD and a SATA III 2.5" SSD. I wouldn't get too wrapped up in SSD benchmarks.