SSD for T60

[Entropy1024]

I have a Lenovo T60 1951-WJ1 and thinking about swapping out the old spinning HD for a SSD.

Have been looking at the Crucial M225 64GB 2.5" SATA-II drive. Will this work in a T60? I believe the bus on laptop is SATA but not sure if it's SATA-II.

Many thanks for any help

[Gustavo]

Any 2.5" SATA SSD will work on the T60 but it will only run in SATA 150 mode so a maximum read/write spd
you can get is 150 mb/s . There is also a nice Corsair P64 SSD with good speed to prize ratio. So to be future proof it is good to buy these faster drives.
Still it should be a great improvement over the 60-70 mb/s of regular HD's .

[Entropy1024]

Thanks for the reply.

In a speed measurement I ran on my HD I got about 34 MB/s tops. So will be happy to get 80MB/s + with an SSD.

So are all the connectors on the SATA drives the same?

Cheers

[mgo]

Thanks for the reply.

In a speed measurement I ran on my HD I got about 34 MB/s tops. So will be happy to get 80MB/s + with an SSD.

So are all the connectors on the SATA drives the same?

Cheers

Yes, the interface is exactly the same. Simply plug the drive in and use the caddy. Some SSDs are thinner, so use a cardboard shim to match the elevation to the socket.

Make sure Defragmenter is disabled, and leave all other settings the same as are found on a mechanical drive.

Ignore any other "expert advice" about other SSD tweaks, as they are bogus.

I've been running Intel X-25M 80 gig SSDs since June on three T60 units.

[Entropy1024]

What kind of real world read/write speeds are you getting with that drive? Know it cant be more than 192 MB/s (1.5Gbit/s).

In my experience the advertised speeds for drives are nowhere close to the real world speed. My T60 HD is supposed to be 61MB/s but benchmarks show approx 32MB/s. I realise the OS is doing stuff in the background slowing down speed tests but at approx 50% of advertised speed it's pretty poor.

[Rofflesaurrr]

- SSDs usually maintain 80% of their speed ratings. A drive rated for 210MBp/s will slow down to about 180. This is normal.

- It would be good to buy a drive that supports TRIM and use it with Windows 7. Normally when you delete a file, the blocks on the hard drive are marked as empty, and not actually deleted. With a normal hard drive, this is not a problem, because the data is simply overwritten. Solid state drives are unable to overwrite old data. The block first must be cleared, and then written to. This will significantly slow down a solid state drive when all the empty blocks are filled. TRIM will erase the blocks immediately, instead of marking them as empty.

- If you don't use Windows 7 and a TRIM enabled SSD, to prevent the drive from slowing down like mentioned above, you'll have to run a special program manually. It performs something called 'garbage collection', which rearranges small bits of data on the drive and clears unused blocks, and essentially accomplishes the same thing. What you do on the computer will determine how frequent you need to run the program. It only takes a couple minutes.

- Make sure you buy a SSD that has on-board cache. Some of the cheaper ones do not, and can cause pauses and stuttering when reading or writing data.

- Like mentioned above, disable disk fragmentation. It will decrease the life of the drive. MLC flash memory cells have a limited lifespan, and can only be written to about 10,000 times.

-If you're using Windows 7, it should detect that you're using a SSD, and automatically disable Defragmentation, Indexing, Superfetch, and Prefetch. You should get a WEI (Windows Experience Index) score of around 7. It is capped at 5.9 for standard hard drives in a non-RAID configuration.

All the SATA2 drives will work with your T60. Even though the T60 is capped at SATA1 speeds, it will be significantly faster. Corsair, OCZ, and Intel all make good SSDs

[Harryc]

So beside the Intel X-25M's, what specific models have on-board cache, are Trim enabled, and work well on a T60?

[Entropy1024]

I bought the Intel X-25M and it averages about 130 MB/s. A huge improvement over the 32 MB/s of the original drive.

Win 7 benchmarks it at 7.2.

Very happy I made the purchase. Does not seem to save battery life though. Seem to get same time out of SSD as the HDD. Perhaps the 'battery time left' meter needs time to get to know the new drive.

Thanks for all the help.

[Rofflesaurrr]

Newer conventional hard drives are very good on battery life. In fact, the Seagate 500GB 7200rpm hard drive I just bought has the same power consumption as my 250GB OCZ SSD.

Other than the Intel drives, the OCZ Summit, OCZ Vertex, OCZ Agility, Corsair P Series, SuperTalent UltraDrive, Kingston SSDNow, Patriot Torx, Crucial M225 Series, and Transcend all support TRIM currently or through a firmware update. Pretty much any SSD that has either a Indilinx or Samsung controller. Future firmware updates can also drastically improve the performance and reliability of SSDs, and some of the lesser known companies don't support their drives as well as others.

All of these drives have on-board cache and will work with a T60.

You'll also notice that some are rated differently. A OCZ SSD may be rated at 120GB, while a Crucial will be rated at 128GB.
Both drives only have 120GB of accessible memory. The OCZ is also technically a 128GB drive, but 8GB on both drives is used for wear leveling. They just advertise differently.