T420 - mSATA Upgrade or UltraBay Upgrade?

[Sense]

Hello. New Thinkpadder here. I just purchased a used T420 and I'm pretty bummed that I missed Fedex... But I'm amped up to take advantage of this machine's expandability. It's coming with a 500gb stock hard drive but I would like to invest in some SSD since I have no idea what the condition of that drive is.

I am planning to get the Crucial MX200 250GB mSATA and use it to dual boot windows 7 and Debian plus a few programs. Thus using the 500gb as storage/backup. I haven't thought about touching the ultra bay yet but from what I've read in these forums, it seems like mSATA is limited to SATA II speeds and the ultra bay can utilize the full SATA III speeds, correct?

A couple questions:
-If you have a multi-storage setup, mind sharing your configuration? (what drive, where is your OS hosted, etc.)
-I plan to dual boot using Debian and Windows 7 on the mSATA, will dual boot hamper SSD performance?
-Is the performance difference between SATA II vs III palpable or negligible?
-Is the 250gb sufficient or should I spend the extra bucks to get the maximum 500gb.
-Any essential apps to maintain the SSD? I have no experience using SSDs, so if you could point me to any resources for newbs, much appreciated.

[theterminator93]

My T420 has the original HDD in the 2.5" bay for large file storage and a Crucial M550 256 in the mSATA slot for the OS and some programs. Runs like a scalded dog, I can swipe my finger on the FPR in a cold shutdown state and be at my desktop in 15 seconds or so.

I can't speak for how much faster it'd run with an identical configuration albeit SATA-III speeds on the SSD, but I can say the SSD benchmarks completely saturate the SATA-II bus.

Windows 7 is SSD aware and will not defragment the SSD and garbage collection should happen in the background. In short, it should be plug-and-play.

[Sense]

My T420 ... Runs like a scalded dog, I can swipe my finger on the FPR in a cold shutdown state and be at my desktop in 15 seconds or so.

Wow. Sign me up, I'm in.

I waste 1 minute+ on my Macbook Pro 2011 to get to the sign on screen. A friend told me to install a SSD, but I used to that money to buy a Thinkpad.

Do think pads come with a whitelist for mSATA?

[theterminator93]

Not that I'm aware of. Buy whatever you like.

I actually sat down and measured the finger swipe to desktop time, as it turns out it's actually 22 seconds to login screen and 27 seconds to desktop - the first 10 of which is the machine powering up going through POST. That's still plenty fast enough for me.

I also just bought a SATA-mSATA adapter for another laptop I have, so I might be able to pop the mSATA drive in the SATA-III drive bay and measure how much faster it boots up later.

[rjwilmsi]

it seems like mSATA is limited to SATA II speeds and the ultra bay can utilize the full SATA III speeds, correct?

A couple questions:
-If you have a multi-storage setup, mind sharing your configuration? (what drive, where is your OS hosted, etc.)
-I plan to dual boot using Debian and Windows 7 on the mSATA, will dual boot hamper SSD performance?
-Is the performance difference between SATA II vs III palpable or negligible?
-Is the 250gb sufficient or should I spend the extra bucks to get the maximum 500gb.
-Any essential apps to maintain the SSD? I have no experience using SSDs, so if you could point me to any resources for newbs, much appreciated.

My T410 has an Intel 330 SSD in the SATA, Crucial m4 SATA in the ultrabay, Intel X18-M via e-SATA. It is single boot off 330, media storage and backups on m4, databases and more backups on X18-M.

I see no performance issue with dual boot off the same drive. When I used to dual boot I favoured two disks but only because you had less chance of the Linux install breaking the Windows install, and you could do it as two disks unaware of each other, so that the boot choice was done through BIOS bootloader. But if you're comfortable setting up the dual boot, don't need two disks.

Yes, mSATA is 3 Gb/s limited on T420 (I have X220 with mSATA) I believe, however, that means you are limited to 275 MB/s sequential read/write, do you regularly have another drive you will be using that could read/write above these speeds? The main point of an SSD is the random read/write being 20 MB/s+ rather than 0.1 MB/s on a mechanical disk. So in short, I would not care for the SATA II versus III difference unless you know you have a specific need to be regularly doing time-critical multi-GB/s sequential transfers.

Up to you how much storage you need. I'm sure 4 or 5 standard installs would fit on 256 GB.

With modern SSDs as a regular user (not writing hundreds of GB per day to drive and leaving the drive idle for some time) I think there's basically no need to do anything special, I don't. Defrag under Windows not needed. I would not bother to manually TRIM it, I would not bother setting noatime. With the first couple of generations of SSDs special care may have been needed, I think not now. The write endurance of the drive in standard use is going to be >> 10 years in default setup.

[axur-delmeria]

My X220 has a 60GB mSATA SSD and a 320GB HDD.

The SSD's usabe space is around 55GB, and has a 40GB partition for Windows 7 and 15GB for Linux.
This setup is not optimal especially if Windows is your primary OS, as cruft accumulates fast in a Windows installation. My Windows installation is rarely used, but already uses up 27 of the 40GB.
In contrast, my Linux root partition isn't even 1/3 full.

120GB is the minimum I'd suggest, but 240/250GB is better if you can afford it, especially if you install games on the SSD.

In my case, the SSD is just for the OSes: all the user documents and files are in the HDD.
The HDD is partitioned like this:
- swap partition for linux
- /home partition for linux
- NTFS partition for Windows user data/documents.

Thus using the 500gb as storage/backup.

If you mean "backup OS installation in case the SSD suddenly conks out", I admit I haven't tried anything like that.

The best I can think of is this:
1. Prepare empty partitions on the HDD that are of the same size as the ones in your SSD.
2. Create weekly disk images of your OS partitions, and put them in an external HDD.
3. Have a bootable media (USB flash drive, CD/DVD) that has the necessary software to deploy those disk images on to the HDD, as well as configure a new bootloader (usually GRUB) on the HDD.

Do think pads come with a whitelist for mSATA?

No.

[hhhd1]

heads up, cause lately the Crucial MX200 have been getting some negative reviews on amazon.com

[Sense]

Thanks everyone.

I've decided on sticking with the mSATA 256gb since I will be using it to host just two OSs and a few essential programs. Thanks for the heads up on the model I was considering (Crucial MX200), will have to do more research on which brand. Any brand/model recommendation for mSATA?

[ajkula66]

Any brand/model recommendation for mSATA?

Meh. The farther we go along, the less I like the new mSATA offerings, and there's really not all that much out there.

If I were buying a mSATA drive today, I'd get Micron M600 which is the OEM version of the drive that you were originally considering with slightly different firmware.

I'd still strongly suggest getting a 2.5" SSD. Generally speaking, they run cooler and perform better. My choice would be Sandisk Extreme Pro or - if you can still find one - OCZ Vector 150.

Happy shopping.

[thinkpadcollection]

Say one have T420 for example: sata HD (spinner) and msata SSD) how this affects the battery runtime vs one sata hard drive (spinnner) without msata SSD?

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[rjwilmsi]

Say one have T420 for example: sata HD (spinner) and msata SSD) how this affects the battery runtime vs one sata hard drive (spinnner) without msata SSD?

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

Idle power of a 2.5" SATA mechanical HDD, around 0.5 W (Western Digital WD1600BEVS 160 GB 2.5'' is 0.6 W). Idle power of an mSATA SSD is < 85 mW (Crucial m4 mSATA 128 GB), as low as ~10 mW for the latest drives (Samsung PM851). Typical power draw of laptop 10 W in WiFi browsing, so 0.1 to 0.85% reduction in battery life.

Though if some of the disk reads/writes use the mSATA rather than the hard drive then as the mSATA is faster you save time spent at 3 W disk full power draw, maybe you would still save battery with the mSATA in.

[thinkpadcollection]

Funny thing, I don't understood about getting them to enter into idle state (rotation stopped too) while LCD is on and typing?

More details of getting the best from power management would be helpful.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[chx1975]

Careful with mSATA, the Net is full of people complaining about overheating and indeed I am returning a Crucial m550 mSATA because it overheats. I will put in a Sandisk Ultra II 480GB instead.

[ajkula66]

I will put in a Sandisk Ultra II 480GB instead.

Doesn't Ultra II use TLC NAND?

Not something I'd trust my data with, but to each their own...