Lenovo provided SSD for W520?

Gentlemen,
among the buying options Lenovo offers for the W520 there is an Intel SSD - I understand the advantage of an SSD over traditional HD but I was wondering if the SSD offered by Lenovo was worth its price or I'd better off with another brand post purchase?

Thanks for your feedback, Erminio

 

Depends on the price. What price are you seeing?

 

And don't forget the ThinkPad W520 can be equipped with an mSATA SSD after market to give you the best of both worlds. See the drives & storage section of this review by Zaz Lenovo ThinkPad X220i Review (for an X220, but applies to any Sandy Bridge equipped ThinkPad)

 

Yeah, you really get the best of both worlds with a mSATA drive, but you'll have to do it yourself as Lenovo doesn't offer them. I'd get one of those and hang out until platter drive prices come back to earth, then pick up a 1TB for the main bay.

 

Here's a more concrete example. The W520 currently comes with the 320GB HDD.

The Intel Series 320 160GB SSD is $289 USD at Newegg.com - Intel 320 Series SSDSA2CW160G3B5 2.5" 160GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD).

The W520 upgrade price to go from the HDD to the 160GB SSD on lenovo.com is currently $400. The gap between them is usually smaller but you get the idea.

 

You can buy it aftermarket, but for obvious reasons Lenovo will not cover that CRU. If you spend the 400 through Lenovo, you get the whole laptop warranty on the SSD (OEM drive).

 

The drive I linked to has a 5 year warranty from Intel.

 

Right but I found in my line of work as IT, people don't want to deal with the warranties themselves. They can call up Lenovo, and a technician will come over and replace the SSD. Also your OS gets installed and all drivers/recovery partition is imaged on to the SSD. Personally no I wouldn't buy the SSD from Lenovo, but I can see how it attracts to certain buyers getting it from Lenovo. Also same applies with people buying 8 GB RAM from Lenovo. They don't want to deal with opening up the machine themselves.

Famous quote: "Never give a software engineer hardware stuff to fix."

 

That's because they overpaid by $200. They might as well get satisfaction.

 

There -is- the time/effort/hassle factor involved here. While experienced users can easily swap out drives, it still takes time to do so. For less experienced users, they could really get into trouble, not to mention the time involved hassling with it all.

The reason I prefer to order Lenovo laptops with a default SSD is for the lack of time and effort. Open the box, boot it up. Nothing more.

And, as pointed out above, if it comes to it, the warranty can be much nicer if you're using the Lenovo supplied drive.

If there were some huge $$$ diff between stock vs. aftermarket, I might think about it, but for whatever minor amount diff, I'd just rather get it ready to go.

 

Certain CTO models, the Lenovo provided SSD is actually cheaper. A couple people were managed to get a T420s with a 160 GB SSD for around 1100, which by itself is easily 220+ if you were to buy it aftermarket.

 

And there's always the price glitches that Lenovo actually honors... as they did when they accidentally priced the Intel X25-M 80GB drives lower than the 160GB HDDs way back when for the X200! In general though, if you do have the know-how and the time, it would be to your advantage to install your own SSD.

 

There were also the million dollar Thinkpads