64 GB Solid State Disk(SSD) 2.5 SATA Laptop Hard Drive

[Greg Gebhardt]

Would this fit and work in my T61p?

What kind of performance would be gained as far as speed and power consumtion in comparison?

Would all I need is a USB clone kit to move my HD info onto this SSD?

Where can these drives be found. I know of one for $900

Thanks for any help in advance

[freakwave]

Hi Greg,

yes it works very well, I have a Memoright 64GBytes GT series in my T60p. Performance improvement is insane.
Boot time is easily cut in half.
HDtach returns 90MBytes/sec read speed.


Just the price is hefty.

I bought it at www.futurestorage.co.uk

Kind regards,

Wolfgang

[Greg Gebhardt]

Thats what I wanted to know. I would rather have 128gb SSD but I am only using 43gb of my drive now.

How hard was it to set up? What was involved?

Now hoping a few more respond with where to pick one up the cheapest

[freakwave]

the setup was very easy.

I always clone my boot partition with powerquest drive image.
Just copy the partition with mbr and set partition to active.
I am using the second harddrive adapter for that.

The only thing I always have to do is remove all the drive letters from the hkey_local_machine/system/MountedDevices registry key.
You can just use regedit on your active window to open the registry on the new ssd partition. After deleting all the values there, you can put the ssd in the primary slot and boot.

Regards,

Wolfgang

[vital-analitix]

Digging up an old thread

Just discovered the very reasonably priced Smasung 2.5" Hybrid HDD with 256 Mb non volatile flash.

I am interested ot know if I can just put this into my Z61m and / or if anyone has experimented with it and / or if anyone has opinions on this.

Samsung claims 4 -5 seconds startup time when booting versus 30-40 seconds without the non volatile flash memory.

samsung hm12HII

Many thanks in advance,

marinus

[hellosailor]

Caveat emptor on flash drives. The typical chips used in USB sticks and the like are good for 5000 writes, and then they start failing. Other chips are good for 100,000 writes--at much higher prices.

Before I tried to steal the money for a solid-state hard drive, I'd want to know how many write cycles it was guaranteed for, and compare that to how many I MIGHT put on it, in the worst case use. These are still very much "consumable" parts, at this time.

[vital-analitix]

Caveat emptor on flash drives. The typical chips used in USB sticks and the like are good for 5000 writes, and then they start failing. Other chips are good for 100,000 writes--at much higher prices.

Before I tried to steal the money for a solid-state hard drive, I'd want to know how many write cycles it was guaranteed for, and compare that to how many I MIGHT put on it, in the worst case use. These are still very much "consumable" parts, at this time.

Many thanks for this info - I did read somewhere that reliability is questionable and seems to be less than of the standard hard disk. Will be staying away from it.

Marinus

[ljwobker]

it's very true that all flash chips have a finite number of write cycles, but *most* of the newer SSDs are using chips that have very large write cycle capabilities, and have abstraction layer hardware that "evens out" the wear on any one portion of the drive.

If you're looking at the most recent generation of drives, their expected lifetimes should be perfectly good enough for the majority of users. If you're doing something where you write to the drive all day (i.e. massive video editing, constant database manipulation) you may want to stick with mechanical, but I don't think the majority of thinkpad users fit that category.

HTH.

--lj

[robvarga]

it's very true that all flash chips have a finite number of write cycles, but *most* of the newer SSDs are using chips that have very large write cycle capabilities, and have abstraction layer hardware that "evens out" the wear on any one portion of the drive.

If you're looking at the most recent generation of drives, their expected lifetimes should be perfectly good enough for the majority of users. If you're doing something where you write to the drive all day (i.e. massive video editing, constant database manipulation) you may want to stick with mechanical, but I don't think the majority of thinkpad users fit that category.

HTH.

--lj

It could also improve speed when doing frequent code compilation (Java or C++ development), where you have many small file accesses (and therefore potentially many seeks) and then small file (couple of Ks) writes. However, if one cannot trust the device to keep data indefinitely then it cannot be used for it.

Best regards,

Robert

[hellosailor]

"However, if one cannot trust the device to keep data indefinitely then it cannot be used for it. "
By that standard, you can only use a magneto-optical drive and you can't even use a conventional hard drive. M/O drives are rated for archival performance (over 100 years) unlike conventional hard drives, which have always had spontaneous failures as the media sometimes flakes off the platters from maufacturing defects, or are damaged from routine debirs and head crashes or simple shocks jogging the heads during use.

Granted that hard drives are way more reliable than they were 15 years ago, they are still not a reliable means of archival storage.

[robvarga]

"However, if one cannot trust the device to keep data indefinitely then it cannot be used for it. "
By that standard, you can only use a magneto-optical drive and you can't even use a conventional hard drive. M/O drives are rated for archival performance (over 100 years) unlike conventional hard drives, which have always had spontaneous failures as the media sometimes flakes off the platters from maufacturing defects, or are damaged from routine debirs and head crashes or simple shocks jogging the heads during use.

Granted that hard drives are way more reliable than they were 15 years ago, they are still not a reliable means of archival storage.

Short of hardware defects, hard drives still have an expected lifetime of many more years than the SSDs have at the moment, AFAIK.

This is what I referred to.

BR,

Robert