T60 recommended SSD

[Ken Edmonds]

I've just picked up a couple of pretty well mint T60s with Windows 7 Pro for what seems a reasonable £140 the pair including carriage.
They only had T2400 cpus but change out of $4.00 - £3.00 for a pair of T7200s seemed more than fair too.

I want to put a 500GB SSD in one of them and I have no experience at all of SSDs.

Has anybody any recommendations, suggestions of what to avoid or general tips?
Although I'd rather do a clean install, I'll have to clone the existing disc as there's no recovery partition and the discs aren't available from Lenovo.

Thanks in advance.

[Thinkpad4by3]

Its a T60, your limited to SATA I, maybe SATA II speeds(not sure if Middleston bios works on this). Any SSD you get will be faster than this. I'd just get a cheap Inland one from Microcenter or amazon. They're like 20$ for a 128, 40$ for a 256, and I'm assuming 80 for the 512. They're nice drives for the price and its not like getting a Samsung Pro series will do any good because it won't be any faster. Save your money, and the performance will still kick the absolute living crap out of the drives that are currently in there.

[Shredder11]

I'm in the UK too and put Crucual BX SSD drives in mine since 2012 onwards, and they work really well indeed. I've put them in my Z61p machines which are the same as T60p. I forget where I bought my drives from as I vary this, so maybe CCL, eBuyer, Scan or Amazon etc.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0784SLQM6/ ... th=1&psc=1

[Cigarguy]

Love the T60 machines, I still have one as a daily runner. Most any SSD will be faster than what this machine can handle. Makes a huge difference in speed. SSD are cheap these days so anyone will do. You don't hear much of chronically bad SSDs from any reputable manufacturer.

[Ken Edmonds]

I agree they're great machines. My daily user - this one - is 15.4" 4:3 with a T5600, 3GB memory running XP but XP is becoming a problem as many websites need later browsers and it's beginning to look tired as well. Not the machine's fault, I use it a lot but it could do with a new palmrest and keyboard bezel which are like rocking horse droppings for a 15 inch.

We both prefer 4:3 screens so nothing later's an option anyway but I wasn't expecting 12 year old laptops to look as they do. There's a couple of odd marks outside but when I opened them up you could believe they're brand new.
I'm hoping and assuming the Ultrabay SATA adapter I bought when I first got the T42 will work for cloning the drive.

I'll look around and see where the best deal is for a 500GB drive now I know there's nothing to look out for.

Thanks for the help.

[Lister]

Try to find SSD drives that use MLC memory chip, like Kingston KC400, OCZ(Toshiba) Vector 180, Crucial M500 or Samsung 850 Pro. They have a longer life than new SSDs that use SLC and TLC chip memory. These SSD drives are more expensive and can sometimes be bought at local outlets. Recently I managed to buy Samsung 850 Pro 1TB for 120 Eur.

[Thinkpad4by3]

Try to find SSD drives that use MLC memory chip, like Kingston KC400, OCZ(Toshiba) Vector 180, Crucial M500 or Samsung 850 Pro. They have a longer life than new SSDs that use SLC and TLC chip memory. These SSD drives are more expensive and can sometimes be bought at local outlets. Recently I managed to buy Samsung 850 Pro 1TB for 120 Eur.

I think you got that backwards. SLC is the one you want. SLC has 100K write cycles while MLC only has 5K. If its a low priority machine, its fine to use a MLC chip. Its not like they're that bad. 5K write cycles still means on a 512GB drive you would need to write 2500TB of data before the drive wore out. TLC is worse with only 3K writes.

[mbr12]

I have Intel 320-series 300gb ssd in my T60 and an old M57 desktop. Both have been working great for years. They're way faster than a spinner and reliable, so far.
I have an Intel s3510 800gb as well. I didn't install it into the T60, but did slip it in briefly to see if the T60 recognized it the bios, and it did, (but the M57 didn't--?)

[Ken Edmonds]

The only one I found that said it was SLC was a WD Green 480GB for £60 so, as I was going cross-eyed by then, I ordered one.
Not the fastest apparently but as I'm limited to SATA 1 anyway I don't suppose it matters.

[Cigarguy]

Be careful with SLC, MLC and TLC marketing. Most consumer grade SSDs that advertise SLC is for the cache portion only not the storage components. Most consumer grade SSDs uses TLC for data storage. MLC SSDs are desirable but they are only available in upgraded models and will be more expensive than TLC. No way no how can you get a complete SLC or even a MLC 512GB SSD for anywhere near 60 pounds.

Any new SSD will be bottle neck by SATA I, SATA II and most will saturate SATA III. All will greatly improve the computing experience.

As with any storage device, never trust it as sooner or later it will fail. Backup then backup the backup of any important data. I still have my computer Pascal programming code from 1988 (high school) though finding a computer to run said code might be problematic.

[Shredder11]

As with any storage device, never trust it as sooner or later it will fail. Backup then backup the backup of any important data. I still have my computer Pascal programming code from 1988 (high school) though finding a computer to run said code might be problematic.

Very true and I am so glad I made sure to have a complete backup of my Synology DS415+ NAS box, because that has a CPU that Intel attempted to do a cover up on. Two years ago they manufactured thousands or more CPUs, that went into all manner of devices. It came to light they knew every single CPU would fail in the near future. So cue many angry and upset customers who like me, had invested hundreds and even thousands of pounds on their hardware to only have it die shortly after. My NAS refused to boot and was effectively dead the other week, but luckily I had my backup on external USB 5TB drives. However I did manage to solder a resistor to the NAS motherboard, and that very luckily brought it back to life but who knows for how long.

[ac12]

As I recall you really want to do a clean install on a SSD, not a clone.
Research if/how to create an install disk from the existing installation.

[JBUK]

I am a bit late to this discussion as you have already bought your SSD. But if you are using XP then the best buy is a Samsung because the supplied Magician software includes an optimisation routine that performs Trim for you on an XP setup.
I have a couple of T6Xs that run XP and I run the program every month or two.
It is worth putting a T61 mobo in your 15" too so that you can benefit from SATA2 disk speeds.
Additionally Acronis true image has a standalone Trim program in their 2013/4 versions. There may be others but they are the only ones i have seen.

[Ken Edmonds]

As I recall you really want to do a clean install on a SSD, not a clone.
Research if/how to create an install disk from the existing installation.

As I said in the initial post, I would much rather have done a clean install but as there is no recovery partition and the discs aren't available from Lenovo, it's not an option.

The drives arrived and it's fitted. All seems to be working well so far and the WD Dashboard includes TRIM so that's covered.

When I first got the T42 I bought a fake SATA adapter for the UltraSlim bay which worked fine although did appear to be in geological time, continental drift is faster.
I don't know if that was the adapter or the Acronis software I used. I usually use Ghost 2003 but there seemed to be some doubt as to whether it worked properly on Windows 7 so I decided not to chance it.

[Ken Edmonds]

It is worth putting a T61 mobo in your 15" too so that you can benefit from SATA2 disk speeds.

I just remembered I'd seen this comment.
The idea did briefly cross my mind but as it's a 4:3, I'd have to buy one of the new old stock IBM boards. On top of the initial price, with international carriage, the current exchange rate, import duty and 20% VAT on everything, the total cost just doesn't make sense.