Questions regarding the M.2 SSDs and the T440s (And other new Haswell Lenovos)

So I'm waiting to pull the trigger on a T440s when it is finally available here in Canada (Hopefully within two weeks), and as per usual, I usually get a pretty low spec system and add parts (memory, storage) after the matter. My question is regarding the new M.2 SSD interface.

Currently on my W530, I am using the mSATA interface as my primare OS drive (128 mSATA), and I use the 2.5" SATA drive as a storage drive (Seagate 750GB). I do this because I like having my OS and paging on the fastest medium possible while keeping personal files and archival material separate. This also helps me a lot in terms of time-saving when I occasionally re-format.

To prepare for this, I'm reading the T440s user guide, and in every occasion, it's recommending NOT to use the M.2 SSD interface as the boot-up drive and insists that this only be used for HDD caching, supplementing performance for what should be the boot-up HDD, which is the 2.5" SATA bay.

So, my question is two-fold. Most importantly, will booting up with the M.2 interface even work? (i.e., is it a BIOS think where they won't even let you select the M.2 interface as a boot-up drive) If so, I understand there are different sizes (physical dimensions) of M.2 drives - Is the T440s compatible with all of them?

Thanks in advance!

Larry

 

The M.2 slots in the T440 series are 42mm, which is the smallest for M.2 SSD cards and the highest-capacity one currently available is the 128GB version from MyDigitalSSD. It is not the fastest SSD out there, but fast enough IMO (and faster than the Intel 310 mSATA drive I currently use in my T420). Intel supposedly has a 120GB model coming out soon. Not sure we'll see anything with a higher capacity than these two for some time, though considering mSATA cards are only 9mm longer and already come in 512GB sizes I'm sure eventually small M.2 cards will catch up.

I'm also curious about using these as boot drives. It can be done, I plan to do it and many people seem to have done it, but it reportedly requires changing the boot mode in the bios to "legacy", so you lose the slight speed advantages of the newer UEFI mode when waking from sleep/hibernation. No idea if there are any other disadvantages of using an M.2 SSD as a boot drive, but from what I remember mSATA drive were also originally marketed as purely cache drives (and sometimes still are).

One thing to note with the T440s is it can be configured with three M.2 slots (one listed as "additional expansion option") or two M.2 slots including one for double-sided cards.

 

Small correction: It is not the smallest M.2 formfactor. There is also the 30mm formfactor, which also could be used for Cache SSDs.

 

I doubt we'll ever see 30mm M.2 SSDs, though I'm no expert and am often proved wrong

 

Thanks for the responses, guys.

PIPSpeak. Are you guys sure about losing the UEFI functionality? After doing some googling, this video claims that it is booting off of an M.2 SSD and it looks like a UEFI boot screen.

Also, I am currently running UEFI when booting up with my mSATA - That's probably doesn't say too much though, as M.2 and mSATA might work differently.

 

I've also seen that video but no idea what his setup was. The only 42mm M.2 SSD of any size currently available afaik is the MyDigitalSSD 128GB and by all accounts this requires legacy boot to work in lenovos. Whether this is a "feature" of Lenovo machines in particular, that card in particular, or something to do with how M.2 cache-drive slots are configured in general, I'm not sure. Perhaps others could chime in.

 

Also, with these new Haswell based laptops, can anyone figure out if these systems do come with 3 M.2 slots, are any of them connected to the PCIe bus, or are they all SATA controlled?

 

Hey I'm waiting for it to show up on .ca also haha...

If it has UEFI, booting off mSATA should work. It takes some effort to get it setup though:

Rod Smith - Managing EFI Boot Loaders for Linux
Arch Wiki - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#UEFI

rEFInd provides a boot option menu in addition to what you get when you spam f8 or del during POST (USB, PXE, SDHC cards...)

All the boards I've seen that use UEFI allow you to opt-out and use the "legacy" option. You can just setup the boot order of your devices that way if you want. But, I haven't seen screenshots of the BIOS on these units yet.

I'm also wondering how many storage controllers are on these machines as well.

 

I'd like to be able to keep UEFI - I'm also wondering if M.2 FF SSDs operate in the same way as mSATA, or if they are architecturally different.

 

Ok now I share your concern:

Samsung XP941 NGFF M.2 PCIe SSDs in RAID 0 - Worlds Smallest SSD Combination Hits 2GB/s | The SSD Review

In the comments he mentions, "...enabling a PCIe card as a boot drive means that it must be recognized before the system bios in a separate BIOS..."

 

not sure if it makes a difference, but I believe Lenovo's M.2 slot uses a SATA interface rather than native PCIe

 

Yes. As long as the OS fits, it ships

Source: Owner of a Lenovo laptop with M.2 SSD.

 

You are correct on this one.

Only Apple has PCIe M.2's, however they use a different connector than traditional M.2 drives, making them proprietary.

 

That's pretty much what I am finding in my research as well. Basically, M.2 describes the physical form factor, but there are two types of SSD drives: PCIe and SATA.

It's like comparing two 3.5" HDDs, but one has a SATA connection and the other has a SAS connection.

Anyhow, the SSDs that we are looking for would be only SATA; in turn, they should be all be bootable.

Now, the question for me is if they are bootable while retaining UEFI functionality, and when these drives will actually hit the market.

Currently, the only option is the MyDigitalSSD, and quite frankly I have a extremely hard time justifying purchasing a drive from them given a non-existent track record. This is going to be my OS drive and reliability is a concern. This and the fact that they only support booting up in legacy (non-UEFI) mode makes it a no-buy for me. Doing a bit more digging, the following seem to be coming out very soon;

Sandisk U110
Intel Pro 1500
Plextor M5

All of these will be releasing in M.2 form factor, but I am not sure if all of these will be released in the 42mm iteration of M.2, or if a desired capacity would be available. All these might all get released and all might require legacy BIOS to run as well, just like the MyDigitalSSD drive. Anyhow, lots of questions still.

Larrt

 

My thoughts as well. The only thing currently holding me back from pulling the trigger on the T440p is the lack of M.2 SSD options. The MyDigitalSSD option does use Toshiba memory, which is reliable, and it has a controller that at least has a bit of a track record, but I'd rather have a choice. The MyDigitalSSD is also relatively slow for SATA3, not that it'll make a huge difference day-to-day, and I also have no idea how good the controller is in maintaining performance over time.

We seem to be waiting so long these days between announcement and launch of components and computers that it's hard to tell when, or even if, any other 42mm M.2 options will arrive (and I continue to curse Lenovo for not giving us an 80mm slot, at least in the larger machines). The Intel Pro 1500 42mm drive is the one I'm really waiting for because it's warrantied for 5 years and my current Intel mSATA drive has been flawless. At this stage I'm on the verge of giving up the thought of getting a new computer this year and just waiting to revisit the situation in January.

Hopefully we'll learn more about booting off the M.2 drive next week once US buyers start to receive their new T440 machines.

 

They are. Want some screenies?

 

Yes please.... and some details

 

Here is a screenshot of the boot menu on my Y410p (which has a lot in common with the T440p), and you can see the LITEON drive is recognized and can be booted from, but i have not installed an OS onto it, so if i press enter to boot it will just boot back to my main HDD.

 

Thanks Jobine! So I'm taking it that the LITEON is an SSD? Is it an mSATA drive?

Also, are you sure that UEFI is enabled on that system?

Larry

 

The LITEON drive is M.2 42mm, not Msata. The drive is marked as SATA because it uses a SATA IO controller instead of a PCIe one.

In this screenie, UEFI is disabled, but the drive will work in UEFI mode too, take my word for it. The reason why is because I am using it at the moment as a cache drive, not an OS drive.

 

Going back just a bit... a M.2 SATA SSD is recognized by the system BIOS just as any other drive, therefore it is bootable. A native PCIe SSD is not recognized by any motherboards (to this point) and cannot be recognized with the SATA devices, therefore, it has no way to boot. It must have its own indpendent way of booting from the PCIe lanes, just like any previous PCIe card did (ie Revo), and present cards included (Scorpion).

 

Have you installed a new OS on the M.2 drive? From what I've read so far one has to revert to legacy boot in order to see and select the drive for an OS installation, at least according to the M.2 drive vendor MyDigitalSSD. So how do you get back to UEFI mode after that? (I don't know much about UEFI vs. bios, so pardon my ignorance!)

 

Theres a setting in the BIOS. You can pick UEFI boot only, or Legacy Support. Note that with Legacy Support Enabled you can still boot UEFI drives.

 

No, i need my M.2 as a caching drive. As someone who shuts down their laptop when it's not in use, I would rather have 8 second startup than 45 second startup.

 

I think most likely the manual is only saying that you'd have a hard time fitting a (Windows) OS on to the 16GB cache drive. Of course Linux can fit there easily if you really wanted to. But it sounds like otherwise booting should be fine given you upgrade the M.2.

 

I dunno, I didn't like what the manual says with respect to reliability where it says:

Maybe it's just a CYA drill, but I'm hesitant to sink a big chunk of money into a system with these sort of questions still outstanding.

 

I think that's just because of the size of that ssd that it comes with... 16gb would have a fairly short life...

 

Yeah, I think the reliability issue specifically refers to the drive that comes with the computer. If the bios can see whatever's in the M.2 slot as a SATA device I see no reason it won't be as reliable as any other SATA device assuming the SSD hardware itself is reliable (which is why I'm waiting for an enterprise-grade Intel M.2 drive)

 

This is normal for Lenovo and other OEMs. They can only support so many configurations. Therefore, if you replace the drives with larger storage units, and alter the configuration in a major way, they may not be in a position to help much if something goes wrong. They support what they ship.

That doesn't mean the machine won't work perfectly fine.

I am not a fan of fear tactics, especially with no evidence to support an assertion.

I plan to upgrade all three storage units on my T440s.

 

Panzer06 (Y510p owner) upgraded to a 128GB M.2 drive and he is using it as his boot drive. Works fine if you ask me.

 

You do not want to put your OS on that drive that comes in the system that is for sure. It is way small for one and secondly it will be as slow as molasses because it does not have an Phison S9 controller in it. The Phison S9 controller is the only low density 4 channel controller out at this time that can deliver true SSD performance. That is why we use it on our M.2 offering.

There are no major advantages to using UEFI mode just change to Legacy support until we figure out the UEFI issues that just about every SSD manufacturer is having right now.

You will be very happy with the results of using one of our 64GB-128GB SC2 M.2 SSD's as your main drive on that computer.

Alternatively, if you like the Cache set up and want to use it then grab a 32GB SC2 M.2. Also get rid of express cash and use Fnet in Maximized mode (you will never know you didn't have the SSD in there as your main drive). And as Jobine pointed out you can keep your computer booting in UEFI mode.

MyDigitalSSD

 

They work exactly the same just a size difference. We have no clue why UEFI is not working with these computers and the M.2 Slot and I am sure it is going to be something super stupid simple once it is figured out.

MyDigitalSSD

 

Regarding MyDigitalSSD SSD reliability we have been selling SSD since 2008. If our SSD was not crazy reliable you would have heard about that. We feel our SSD is more reliable than any other SSD on the market. We have a .03% defect rate at around 3pcs in every 1000pcs shipped. Many SSD manufacturers are experiencing upwards of 2-3%. Also we have a 3 year warranty on our drives. We use only the absolute best Toshiba Toggle NAND, Phison S9 controller and it is all put together at the best fab on earth (can't say the name but can tell you companies like Sandisk, Kingston, and Toshiba use it).

If you are uneasy about using the SSD you may also elect to use a mirroring software to backup your SSD on a separate partition on your HDD. That way if your fears ever do come to reality you simply boot from your HDD until your replacement SSD arrives. Also never keep data on the SSD maybe just data that you are using for current projects but your SSD should be used for your OS, programs like Office, Adobe Illustrator..., and applications like games and as long as you have a backup of those you are all set. Any data on your SSD will ultimately result in performance loss on the SSD. The more full it is the more performance will be degraded. Many SSD bloggers will tell you that they don't fill them past half way to keep that fresh out of the box feel.

MyDigitalSSD

 

I have several questions thinking in a linux workstation:

• Would you recomend your 128GB unit as cache? Bc you remark the 32GB one
• When using as cache:
  • are your units able to run with Intel Rapid Start Technology? I'm not sure if this is something really working or just some kind of buzzwording.
  • have you checked the new Linux bcache feature for caching HD with SSD units?

Thanks in advance!

 

I use bcache on my desktop, and intend to use it on my notebook, when I buy one, if I decide to go with mixed spinning and SSD storage. It works very well on my desktop with a 256gb SSD caching a 2tb drive. It is a huge speed boost over just the spinning disk. I don't know how it compares to 100% SSD, because I didn't feel like buying enough SSDs to hold all my working data.

I have the 2tb drive partitioned into a 1gb boot partition containing the kernel and initrd, and a large partition for the rest of the drive. The large partition and the SSD then make a bcache volume which I use as the pv for an lvm. So far I've not had any problems.

Having said all that, bcache is not in a state where it is usable by an inexperienced linux user, unless there's a distribution which has it running out of the box. In Debian unstable I had to setup the bcache-tools myself, and add hooks in initramfs to get the proper programs in the initrd. For a while I also had to pull some patches in from the bcache git to get good performance on 3.11 kernels. 3.12 works fine, though.

It will be great if somebody can confirm it works well on the t440s before I buy one. It would be nice to know if I'm looking at a 256gb SSD + 128gb m.2 or 750gb disk + 128gb m.2.

 

The SC2 will work fine as a cache drive under Linux but the provided software will not so you will have to get other caching sw. The way most caching sw works is it fills the cache partition with the most frequently qued data. So if you get a 128gb that is probably going to be caching just about everything you use so your HDD will rarely spin up and you will pretty much just be running off of SSD. Caching is good for ppl who are looking for a simple way to get SSD speed without worrying about figuring out what goes on the SSD. As we know things change and your caching sw allows for change without any user involvement. If you get a new app you are frequently using it will automatically be cached new game same story. Now let's say you elect for a 32gb it will simply be more choosy about what is cached because there are 32gb to work with. But that is still plenty of room to cache most any OS and many programs such as office, adobe illustrator and the like. Moral of the story buy what you can afford as any cache is better than no cache.

Regarding compatibility: This M.2 SSD will work with the t440s as cache or as a boot drive for sure and anything else OS, Software... that a SATA drive is supposed to work with.

FYI, we also offer this product in the much more popular mSATA format.

Update on UEFI issue: a guy on amazon replied to our one review saying he booted under UEFI.

 

One advantage to mention for the running it as a boot drive argument.

If you put your os and software and current project data on the SSD your HDD will never spin up unless you access it saving you lots of battery power. This would be a good thing for most road warrior types.

 

Thanks for sharing!

Just to say the fresh beta of Fedora 20 now includes it https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/20/ChangeSet#SSD_cache

 

Thanks for the confirmation.

But mSATA units can't fit or work in the t440s internal bays, can they?

 

No, The T440 series no longer have mSATA slots, only M.2

 

With a 128GB M.2 SSD then used as the boot drive how much space is free? I'm not familiar with how much space windows 8 requires but does 22GB sound reasonable? Then leaving ~60GB of the SSD free should give me 40GB to play around with for program files to run directly off the SSD using the harddrive as storage for less frequently used files?

 

Windows 8 requires about the same space as Windows 7 (although in practice it's supposedly slightly more, like 5%) and MS recommends 20GB for the 64-bit version. My Windows7 Pro 64 installation is about 17GB. With that plus almost all the Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Lightroom, Microsoft Office Pro, a giant email archive and a bunch of other random programs, about 50GB of my mSATA boot drive is filled, so a 128GB drive should be plenty. All my data (personal files, music, photos etc.) are on a separate HDD.

 

Correct your system will only work with M.2. I was just letting everyone here know that the product comes in mSATA as well so they could think about grabbing one of those for other systems as well.

 

Thanks for the confirmation.

I can see storing photos on the HDD, but wouldn't storing your personal files on the HDD partially negate the battery saving features of using the SSD? Or would the HDD only spin up when saving/opening?

 

Windows 8 and all the bloat Lenovo adds on the ideapad y510p burned 40GB on my 128GB M.2 SSD

It will be better when memory chips shrink enough for these drives to hold at least 256GB.

Cheers,

 

Battery life is not really my motivation... I simply opted to put OS and programs on the SSD for speed, and everything else on the HDD for convenience (space, ease of backup etc.)

 

I was confused by this, looking at the Lenovo website. It looks like only the cheapest (touch) model and the most expensive (non-touch) model list the M.2 drive as a configuration option. Does that mean some models have no M.2 slot? Or do they just come with an empty slot, but no ssd drive in it?

Also, weirdly, the double sided M.2 card is $10 cheaper? Why? What's the difference with double and single?

Further, on the models configured with the M.2 ssd, they also list a third M.2 slot as standard, as you note. What's in the first M.2 slot? Could you conceivably have four hard drives in this system?

 

My experience, doing this for years with the ultrabay, is that sadly it's not very true. I've found that even using my spare drive as pure storage (ie. no programs, and few if any references to that drive path from the OS, for whatever reason the platter drive would be spun up every few minutes.) I never explored why it was happening, but it has been true over my last couple of computers and it really affected battery life.

 

I would honestly rather use the drive as an ExpressCache than try to manage living within 128GB on my system drive these days. I suspect you'd get most of the performance with a lot less headache.

 

Those two models (the cheap touch one and the expensive non-touch one) are the only two offered with spinning disks. The M.2 drives are not offered on models that come with an SSD. No point in a flash based cache for an SSD.

I have no idea why the double M.2 card is $10 cheaper. It won't actually let me configure it that way, even though it's offered as an option. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the "double" card means that there are two M.2 16GB cards. Back when the double card was $40 more, adding it would delete the third M.2 slot, because it now contained the second M.2 16GB card.

One M.2 slot is occupied with the wifi card.

I have no idea why the multitouch FHD screen is $400 less than the non-touch HD+ screen. Perhaps the models are reversed? If you want a touch screen, this seems like a great time to buy.