Upgrading storage for Zbook 17 (original)

Just won a Zbook 17 on ebay.

It has the presumably original 32GB mSATA + 700GB SATA drives. 32GB of RAM so nowt wrong there.

I can find a new home for the 700 so that is going. That leaves me with 2X 7mm high SATA slots and a currently filled mSATA slot. I will be ordering one of those £5 "Replacement HDD Hard Driver Caddy Tray Bracket" from China.

The intended use will be software development. Windows 10 + Linux. My thought is to add ether a 2TB SATA and a 480GB SS drive or a pair of 480 SS drives. The 32GB might still do some plausible good where it is as a boot drive.

I am under the impression that for casual data storage an old-fashioned SATA hard disk would be the more reliable so tempted towards one of each. I suppose there is also some plausible chance of running out of room with just 1TB total storage.

I am going to presume that there are as many fake SS drives as other types of memory on Ebay so will be cautious.

Total budget planned to be about £150.

Comments please.

 

Well, that brought a lot of response. Guess what I'm after is a tad plebeian.

Done some research & maths. Recon recent SSD's are cheap enough and tough enough now to use for everything. Got my eye on a 2TB Crucial MX500 which won't break the budget by much. Lot easier to sort out than say, a smaller Samsung 860 pro + hard disk + 2'nd caddy ordered from china.

The mSATA is best left as the selection of drives on Ebay look a bit sad. I'm thinking time has past it by.

 

@BlameTheEx, it seems like your post had it mapped out with no questions, so that is most likely why no one commented.

In regards to SSDs, if you can fill the 2.5" SATA, the Crucial is a good buy, and the Samsung 860 EVOs are nice as well. I don't know what kind of dev you plan on doing, but for anything super-IO intensive, the Samsung 860 Pro is the way to go due to the write endurance. Or perhaps a mixture, using a Pro and then a larger (2TB EVO/Crucial or 4TB EVO). If you plan on using a mechanical, maybe a 2TB Seagate Firecuda would suffice.

With the mSata, perhaps a Samsung 860 or Kingston mSata drive... The space is somewhat limited, but perhaps you could use that as a OS boot drive, and then the other ones for storage / project workspace / etc.

Good luck

 

No real point in a SSHD, once the cache is filled it drops to the same (or less, given most are 5400 RPM drives) as a normal HDD.
I would recommend a 2TB SSD+1TB HDD, and then maybe a MSATA 512GB if you can find one for cheap

 

I agree with going all SSD or perhaps adding something like a 2TB Firecuda if a mechanical is used due to budgetary concerns.

Not sure anyone even brought up a Hybrid drive. Were you just saying in general to avoid Hybrids?

 

Yes, but I was referring to the firecuda drives as I mistook them for the barracuda drives

 

Sorry. That's my bad, I did not realize the FireCuda had hybrid tech. I didn't see it mentioned in the Amazon title. In any case, no need to go hybrid with SSD pricing where it's at right now. SSD all the way.

IF BlameTheEx wants to go mechanical, I think either way (FireCuda or BarraCuda) would be fine... And if budget is a concern, then yes a decent mechanical drive would be the way to go.

 

Thing is I have now done some research. Better quality disks handle more writing but number of TB written before failure of warranty is proportion to their capacity. Thinking of life expectancy in terms of TB written per £ spent does a lot to even the field. Add that higher capacity SSD's usually outperform their siblings in the same range and the field evens out again.

So 4 options:


1) Go for a 2TB Samsung 860 Pro. (SSD endurance : 2400TB Written)
Advantage: Fast, Reliable, More capacity than the laptop is ever likely to need.
Disadvantage: Way way over budget.

2) Go for a 1TB 860 Samsung Pro. (SSD endurance : 1200TB Written)
Advantage: Fast, Reliable
Disadvantage. Over budget. Possibly might run out of capacity one day.

3) Go for a 1/2 TB Samsung 860 Pro plus a 2TB HD. (SSD endurance : 600TB Written)
Advantage: Just within Budget, Fast enough, More capacity than the laptop is ever likely to need.
Disadvantage. More fiddle to use to full effect than a single volume solution. Long wait for delivery of a 2'nd caddy from china. More complicated installation. Slightly less battery time. Possibly the least reliable option.

4) Go for a 2TB 2TB Crucial MX500. (SSD endurance : 700TB Written)
Advantage: Reliable enough given expected under use for size, More capacity than the laptop is ever likely to need.
Disadvantage: Slightly over budget. Perhaps a bit slower than other options.

As for the planned use of the laptop. It is more laptop than I could ever justify. It will be my daughter's birthday present. Daughters, I have found are capable of justifying any parental expense. She intends to add more professional computer skills to her degree in chemical engineering. Right now her plans are for hard core Linux based programming but frankly I think she will do better with the sort of high level packages that result in great presentations. Then she could get a job telling people what to do. She will be good at that. Has been right back from the time she learned to talk now that I think on it.


Edit: Nice endurance table Here: https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/samsung-860-evo-ssd-review,review-34198.html

 

Assuming you want to stay within budgetary means, I suggest 4 and if that bothers you go to option 3.

I notice you didn't you price out the Samsung EVO. It might be worthwhile to re-do some of your options using the EVO instead of the Pro and see where that ends up in regards to your budget.

 

Evo is a possibility. Ebuyer prices.

Samsung 860 Evo 1TB+ Cheapest 1TB HD: £189 (SSD endurance : 600TB Written)
Samsung 860 Pro 500GB + Cheapest 2TB HD: £189 (SSD endurance : 600TB Written)
Crucial MX500 2GB: £266 (SSD endurance : 700TB Written)
Samsung 960 Evo 2TB: £301 (SSD endurance : 1200TB Written)
Pair of Samsung 860 QVO 1TB: £233 (combined SSD endurance : 700TB Written)

And there you have it. Must say I expect to beat those prices but the message is clear enough. Combined SD+HD is still going to be cheaper but the saving might not justify the hassle.

There is one last issue - faith in manufacturers information.

I have done my maths and I believe that it will be a rare MX500 that will exceed its write limit before the 5 year warranty runs out. Assuming no morals, a manufacturer with a product capable of similar durability could profit by upping their guarantee outrageously, pumping up the price and crossing their fingers. So the question is how can we tell if any have? Well here at least is a hint:

Samsung 950 pro 2GB warranty: 10 years or 450 TBW
Samsung 960 pro 2GB warranty: 5 years or 2,400 TBW

So does that mean the 960 pro is over 5x as durable as the 950 or is the reduction in time an admission that the new stated write durability is unrealistic but that they are betting the true durability won't be exceeded too often within a 5 year span?

 

First of all personally I would not even look or take into consideration the endurance of SSD, unless you'll run the laptop as 24/7 server, there is very little chance to even hit 500TB writes, before laptop fails otherwise or becomes obsolete. Also I would use 32GB MSATA for Linux only, or get rid of it. All my laptops use at least 30-40GB for Win system files and it would require a lot of effort to fit it on 32GB drive, not worth it if you'll have TB's on the other drive. If I was you, I would get 1TB Samsung EVO and be done with it, you don't really need PRO for your usage and if and when run out of space, I would get something new then, there is no reason not to update the system in the future, when necessary most likely for less money. I found out long time ago that my computer usage changes constantly, so are the requirements of the hardware, so trying to future proof the computer could be pointless.
I also would probably get cheap 1TB USB HDD for backups only, so all your data is not only on the computer (in case laptop is lost for example).

 

Hiya pete. Um sorry I didn't notice your post before which started on a new page. My last post got some serious editing after yours which was not nice of me.

Very much in agreement with you. I am indeed planning to load the 32GB with linux. Won't get rid of it cause it does no harm where it is and its at least possible to do damage in the process. I agree that with a large SSD the chances of hitting the write limit is small. The Evo is a decent choice. Just a tad more expensive than the Mx500. Perhaps an equal tad better too but my budget is stretched.

A simple ITB solution is a viable option but I am a bit of a perfectionist. The laptop has massive RAM, a gob smacking CPU, an almost unbeatable screen (at least until windows learns how to scale up a 4k screen properly), and a video card which if not the bees knees for games has all the right protocols for video intensive software. Finishing up that lot with just an ordinary capacity of storage is just mean. Plus the damned thing was designed to be immortal. You can store an awful lot of data in, well, forever.

I have removed the 750GB HD from the laptop and ordered an external USB box for it. It will be for backup and transferring data between what will be my daughter's two laptops. Don't matter how many backup drives you leave in the laptop - they all get stolen together. Hopefully she will keep the two laptops in separate locations. Least I can dream. When she was young she kept loosing calculators so I bought her a batch. So she took the whole batch to school and lost them together. Grrr. Can't even protest cause I know exactly where she got those genes from.

 

Hi BlameTheEx
No problem, I mentioned EVO instead of PRO since they're both made by Samsung, but Mx500 should be fine as well (without benchmarking hard to tell difference in performance in day to day use between most SSD). Getting USB enclosure and re-purpose old HDD for backup is exactly what I do as well. I have 2 daughters, 8 and 11 yr old and just did something similar, upgraded HDD to SSD on 2 of our old laptops and gave them to kids to play, learn to program Scratch, watch Youtube etc. With SSD those old laptops perform like new. One thing I noticed is that SSD are dropping in prices a lot and this trend should continue, that's why I suggested to buy 1TB SSD now and if short on space in the future, then add another 2 or 4TB, but if you want to be done with with it now, why not. For me 1TB storage was more than enough until I started recording 4k home videos and transferring old HD DV tapes to my computer, so now 2-4TB doesn't seem much and probably will be adding more storage soon, but I don't know what your storage needs are. Good luck with your new computer.

 

Ok. Admissions time. I bought a Crucial Mx500 2TB yesterday. Cost me £150 + £10 transport + about five hours of my life i'm never going to get back.
That last because I bought it on gumtree from a guy who didn't think to check if his machine had the space before buying it. Problem was he also didn't think to go to bed the night before my first attempt at bang bang banging on his door. Might not sleep nights but a sound daytime napper. So that was 2 round trips across London to collect.

Finally in and installed with windows 10 pro so I can boast to the world rather than hide my incompetence . Didn't give it a password but I'm hoping it will be happy with the original Win 8 pro licence. It doesn't seem to be complaining.
So, more or less kept to the budget. I would have gone for any of the other options happily enough but this was the deal that turned up. total spend roughly £530.

 

Pete.

You do have a point and I will admit that over buying memory has bitten me all too often in the past. But yeh, I just wanted the whole thing done. When you are as skinflint as me every laptop is a saga of dodgy deals and setups that might turn others to religion but just leaves me with a firm conviction in the existence of the devil. Truth is I will now be overjoyed if I never see the bugger again cause that will mean another session of daddy will fix it.

Not that daddy fix has ended just yet. There is the laptop that daughter bought for herself. Don't know much about it other than it is some sort of games machine that her boyfriend thought was a good idea at the time. Apparently it has a 4k screen that windows made unusable till it was set to 1080 mode. A caution to us all.

Anyway she tells me it got left with some guy to fix some weeks ago after it stopped and started making funny noises. He reported back that it needed a new motherboard and daughter concluded she needed a new laptop. Huh, I says, peep sounds? (thinking of the POST beep call of a distressed motherboard). No. A ticking sound? That was it. Fool repairman knows not the death rattle of a HD.

So she got the beast back and it will be my next task. This time I will be going with your suggestion Pete, and just dumping in a cheap 1TB SSD. Don't have as much faith in the life expectancy of a games machine, however posh, and I expect it's now going to be the reserve laptop. Plus the horrible thought that the guy might be right, or at least right now after he played with it.