Recommend a replacement hard drive for a T430?

I have a T430 with a 500 GB hard drive. It's getting full and as preventative maintenance/backup step, I would like to pull the old drive and replace it with something larger.

I'm thinking 750+. The reason I am asking in the Lenovo specific forum is because I'm not sure if it matters much for my model whether I get 3 or 6 GB/sec or 16, 32 or 64 MB of cache.

I don't care all that much about speed but I am planning on a 7200 RPM drive.

The specs for my machine are as follows:

T430
Intel i5 3320M @ 2.6 Ghz
4 GB RAM
64 bit Windows 7 Professional

Thinking about upgrading the RAM at the same time. Any suggestions? Thanks.

 

The interface speed and the cache size don't really matter, but you do need to get a 2.5" drive that's only 7mm tall. I think there's only a handful of these that are more than 750GB. If you don't already have one I think you should just supplant the 500GB drive with a 256GB mSATA instead of replacing it outright.

 

Thanks. I was not aware of the mSATA until you mentioned it. I'm sure I read about it when I purchased the computer, but that was over a year ago and I did not remember. Is there a particular brand that is recommended? I see Crucial has one listed. Are there others that are better?

I was also not aware that I needed one that is 7mm tall if I replace the main drive. I see if I were to stick with the main drive strategy I would have to either go smaller than 1 TB or sacrifice speed (5400 RPM instead of 7200 RPM) or I would have to go with a SSD which would result in spending $500.

 

All SSDs are fast. I wouldn't get hung up on brand so much as there's little practical performance difference between them.

If you get the mSATA, you probably don't need a 7200RPM drive as speed isn't as important for storage. I have the WD 1TB 5400RPM drive in my X220. It's been a cool quiet performer.