Help buying a ThinkPad Yoga - questions about HDD and SSD

[smelly beard]

Hello. I am planning to buy a ThinkPad Yoga 14 here in the UK direct from Lenovo. I would like a 512gb SSD in the configuration options, but to change from the default 500gb HDD + 16gb caching SSD to a 512gb SSD, this adds over £200 to the cost. Why is this when a quick search of Amazon finds a "Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive" for £130? My real question is how easy would it be to buy the Samsung SSD from Amazon and swap it for the HDD as soon as I receive the Yoga - would it fit for starters, and what do I need to do to move all the things the laptop will come with (such as Windows..) from the HDD to the SSD? Also what of the 16gb M2 SSD, will that cause issues if it continues to "cache"? As you may have gathered I am not all too knowledgeable so any help is appreciated.

[i2000s]

First of all, SSD brands are very different (both price-wise and performance-wise).

Second, sellers added manufacturing costs and selling leverages onto the products. For example, one denomination >$2000 Xeon E5-*** CPU equipped in a Dell workstation actually is only sold as a few hundreds bucks on Amazon. But you cannot just buy a CPU without considering the cost of establishing assembly lines of computer products. For middle-end computers, computer manufactories usually shift the cost of other commonly manufactured parts to CPUs and SSDs/hard drives to make the CPUs or hard drives look like very expensive, but this is a common strategy for computer manufactories to encourage people to buy cheaper models so that the cost of per computer drops with a massive selling while making more money from people who would like to pay more for a middle-end configuration. For high-end computers or less-manufactured computers, computer manufactories usually raise the price a lot compared to the massively sold models to increase the profit rates. As has been well-known, if an assembly line only produces a few hundreds of computers a day will cost a lot more per computer than a line that produces tens of thousands of computers per day. Computer sellers play some strategies in order to leverage the average profit rates.

If I were you, I would focus on what you really need at this moment and consider the real budget. From my personal experience, the denomination price raised from different configurations usually does not compensate the cost if you just want to buy a cheaper configuration and then upgrade the configuration to a better one immediately. Certainly if you want to upgrade the hardware one or two years later, that's another story.

[smelly beard]

Thanks for the reply and details of how computer manufacturers make their money - interesting and informative about the price difference for the ssd upgrades.
However let me rephrase my question..
Now that I own the following: TPY 14 with 500gb HDD + 16gb M2 SSD, Samsung 850 Evo 500gb SSD and a sata to USB connector, what do I need to do, if anything, to swap the two main drives over? If I do a clean install of Windows, will it continue using the M2 drive to "cache" (presumably unnecessary with a new ssd in the sata slot) or treat it as a separate storage drive (which I want it to do). Thanks in advance for any light anyone can shed on this.

[i2000s]

I don't own a Yoga machine, but I think it doesn't hurt if you try a swap which I usually do on my old machines:

Clone your HD to SSD since they have the same capacity. Replace your HD with SSD, and you can use your HD for whatever purpose you want. Your Windows system will not be affected in this way. I guess this is what you want.

Possible issues: there may be some issues if the SSD has a little smaller capacity than the HD when you clone the disk. If that happens, you can try to format out a little bit space in your HD to unpartitioned space before cloning.

Good luck!

[jedisurfer1]

This should be easy if your SSD is the same size or bigger than the drive that came with it. I use clonezilla live it will boot via cd or bootable usb.

Once booted just tell it to clone device to device. Clone source sda (your original 500gb drive) to destination sdb (your samsung ssd)

it will prompt for some questions just hit "y" to all of them and clone the bootloader etc everything. It will clone your drive bit for bit.

Now keep the old drive and those partitions the same this way you can clone the data partition that you use and keep it as a backup (then you can clone partition to partition since they'll be the same size). It's really easier than it sounds.

I'm sure there is even a windows utility with a nice GUI if you search.

[SkyValley]

I just bought a Yoga 2 Pro and had a similar question. I was thinking about buying one of these to make it easier https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/96 ... ion-module.

Never heard of TarDisk, but 256gb of flash memory seems cool. Does anyone know the size of the SD slot?

[rambo47]

There are step by step videos on YouTube for changing the hard drive in various Yogas. Looks pretty straight forward. Not as easy as changing the hdd on, say, a ThinkPad W500, but not real tough either. Seems like there is a knack to removing the bottom case but the videos demo the technique well.

[RealBlackStuff]

I would think twice or thrice before buying a Yoga.
Read e.g. this: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=72&t=117578

[i2000s]

I just bought a Yoga 2 Pro and had a similar question. I was thinking about buying one of these to make it easier https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/96 ... ion-module.

Never heard of TarDisk, but 256gb of flash memory seems cool. Does anyone know the size of the SD slot?

The SD card seems a good solution for simple extension space. The speed isn't as good as a SSD, but it's easy to operate.
BTW, I guess the price for a real SSD will drop below the price of the SD card price online by the time it's delivered...