what mSata SSD is "the best"

my newly purchased y580 will arrive very soon (maybe even today) and i have decided with the help of others in my previous thread ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...grades/706195-ssd-swap-hdd-hdd-msata-ssd.html) to upgrade it with an mSata SSD since the HDD is only a slow 5400rpm.

my questions are does the mSata slot on a y580 support Sata III?
what ~240 - 256 GB mSata SSD is the best of these or an others you would reccomend?

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I'm pretty sure that the Y580 is a SATA2 mSATA slot. Either way, the only mSATA SSD I can recommend:

See:
Newegg.ca - Crucial M4 CT256M4SSD3 mSATA 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)


(Will be getting more of these soon).

 

The new Crucial controller in their M500 has been released in the Plextor M5M mSATA.

 

mSATA Plextor M5M or mSATA Crucial M500? Which to pick?

 

I doubt you'd notice a difference between SATA II and III. I would buy whatever is the least expensive of the size you want. All SSDs are fast.

 

Congrats on your new Lenovo Y580. I almost got one but the order got screwed up, and I wound up with a Lenovo T530. >grin<

I looked into this and am fairly sure it only supports SATA II.

It's really no biggie as SATA II is very adequate.

And don't even start with fretting over that the main bay and DVD bay are both SATA III.

I personally either leave the DVD bay empty (saving 5.6 ounces, with just 3M blue masking tape to cover the hole) or pop in the DVD unit when needed, or pop in a HDD in a caddy to backup the boot drive (clone). If that HDD that comes with your Y580 is really big ( > 750GB), once you've got a clone backup of the boot mSATA, you could do more convenient image backups of the boot drive to the resident large HDD in the main bay.

To start with, don't buy any SSD for the next month!

Just use the machine with the HDD that comes with it.

That gets the machine checked out.

If Crucial comes out in March with their new M500 line of SSD (both mSATA as well as 2.5") I'd go with an M500 mSATA that is at least ~256GB (or better the 512GB size), so long as the price is lower than the similar sized M4 mSATA.

Then do a fresh install of Windows on the mSATA as the boot drive, and you'll see your boot times drop from ~1.5 minutes (my current time with my new Lenovo T530) to something like 15 seconds.

 

Crucial hasn't been released yet. But as stated in my previous post, the same controller is used in the Plextor drive. Plextor tends to be a bit more expensive but has excellent customer service and support from my experience. They do their own custom firmware with less overprovisioning and tend to pick finer parts for their NAND.

 

Well that's what I meant, just based on what we know so far and to help us decide which is best. Personally I'm going to buy the M500 mSATA for for its 480 GB capacity, I just hope it fits in my 6475b.

Plextor makes surprisingly reliable and great performing SSDs. Their version sounds very appealing, except for the 256 GB max capacity (to me). Otherwise it's got everything you'd want from an mSATA SSD.

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Plextor SSD's are the bottom of the barrel choice in my opinion.

Why? Because their consistency is what I have come to associate with Samsung SSD's too - sure; great 'up to' speeds and benchmark 'scores' - but real world use leaves a lot to be desired.


See:
AnandTech - Plextor Updates The Firmware on M5 Pro: Promises Increased Performance, We Test It



Look at the link above (last chart on the page) and see how MOST data points are along the bottom...

This is nowhere comparable to what the Crucial M4 does in real life and simply for this reason the Plextor SSD's are to be avoided imo.

 

The Y580 msata slot has a sata III 6Gbit/s speed. At least, that is the case in my Y580.