Thinkpads Forum

Hey guys!

I have a w530 with a standard 2.5" SSD (500 GB) in the main hard drive bay, but am thinking of adding an mSATA drive as well. I looked through the manual and it states that reliability is not guaranteed if I try to make the mSATA SSD as my boot drive, since this drive was meant to be used as a cache.

Since, this is how the system was designed, my intuition tells me that an mSATA SSD that is the same capacity as the main drive (500 GB) would be overkill. Am I wrong about this? Any insights from the community would be greatly appreciated!

But, in the off-chance that my intuition is correct, is there a general rule of thumb on how big the mSATA SSD drive should be relative to the main drive? Like 1/2 of the main drive capacity? Maybe 1/4 of the main drive capacity?

Thanks!

David

Welcome to the forum!

emocupcakes wrote: Since, this is how the system was designed, my intuition tells me that an mSATA SSD that is the same capacity as the main drive (500 GB) would be overkill. Am I wrong about this? Any insights from the community would be greatly appreciated!

No, it would not be an overkill. It all depends on how you use your machine.

There's no "rule" on how big the SSD should be in relation to storage drive. Nowadays I'd go with at least 240GB as a boot drive which in your scenario would be mSATA.

In a dual-drive setup, the SSD usually contains the OS and applications.
After software updates and other cruft, a Windows installation can go over 50GB, so a 120GB SSD is the absolute minimum I'd suggest.
Going for 240GB isn't bad though, especially if you have the budget. Higher capacity SSDs are usually faster due to having more flash chips (parallelized data I/O IIRC), so that's a plus as well.

emocupcakes wrote:Hey guys!

I have a w530 with a standard 2.5" SSD (500 GB) in the main hard drive bay, but am thinking of adding an mSATA drive as well. I looked through the manual and it states that reliability is not guaranteed if I try to make the mSATA SSD as my boot drive, since this drive was meant to be used as a cache.

Since, this is how the system was designed, my intuition tells me that an mSATA SSD that is the same capacity as the main drive (500 GB) would be overkill. Am I wrong about this? Any insights from the community would be greatly appreciated!

But, in the off-chance that my intuition is correct, is there a general rule of thumb on how big the mSATA SSD drive should be relative to the main drive? Like 1/2 of the main drive capacity? Maybe 1/4 of the main drive capacity?

Thanks!

David

We have a number of machines from that generation in our home. I have almost all of them with an OS drive in the mSATA slot with a larger, or similar sized one in the 2.5" SATA bay. The mSATA have ranged from 120/128Gb in my son's X220 to 480Gb in my T430 and I have a 600Gb Intel SSD in the 2.5" bay for data. It's a bit "overkill", but I won't worry about storage for the life of the machine. I've also done a number of other machines for people with either 240Gb or 256Gb in the mSATA.

They all have been fine regardless.