SSD in caddy or mSATA?

Getting a T420, still familiarizing myself with prices. Do I get a better price/quality ratio from buying a solid state hard drive and installing it in the ultrabay, or from getting a slightly larger normal hard drive (340 to 500 is +$40) and a smaller mSATA?
Educate me!

 

You can always order the $40 upgrade to get the 500GB 7200rpm hard drive. Lenovo will put Windows 7 and other stuff on it, but in your scheme of things, it will be formatted to be used as a storage drive.

You can buy a small mSATA SSD (64GB or 80GB) and install it in the WWAN socket, then either "recover" Lenovo image on it or install Windows on it yourself (after copying the C:\SWTOOLS folder on a USB flash drive). The stock HDD remains in the primary drive. This approach is the simplest.

Or, you can buy a small 2.5" SSD (64GB or 80GB) and install it in the primary bay, then handle the software part as outlined above, PLUS adding an UltraBay HDD caddy adapter (removing the UltraBay ODD) in order to house the stock HDD as a storage drive. This approach is a bit more involved.

Or, you can buy a large and expensive 2.5" SSD (256GB?) and replace the stock HDD with it. Basically, your T420 has only one fast primary drive. Expensive and less space? Hmm.

I usually go with the "small SSD in primary bay + large HDD in UltraBay caddy" route. But, with relatively little effort and expense, you can add a small mSATA SSD while keeping both the HDD and ODD in their usual places. So, this is perhaps the preferred approach.

 

I have an mSATA as well as a regular SSD. I started with an Intel 80GB mSATA and the stock 320 GB 7200 RPM drive in my T420. I used the mSATA as my boot drive where I have installed the OS and all other software and the 320GB for my documents (mainly MS Word, Acrobat files, a fairly large bibliographic database of about 11GB which includes citations and pdfs, browser cache, search indexes, etc). That worked very well for a while. But as the database kept getting bigger and more complex the 320GB drive would take about five minutes to load on the stock drive (system has 8GB of RAM) or crash. I found out that this is because the numerous files that constitute the database (120,000+ and growing) were scattered all over the place, the disk needed constant defragmentation (almost nightly). So, I recently upgraded to a Crucial M4 SSD and moved the 320GB into the Ultrabay and use it for full system backups every night. Now the database runs flawlessly (no need for defrag at all) and nightly backups are fast. The system is fast, but more importantly, it is very stable and I never worry about it freezing while I am in the middle of writing and trying to meet deadlines.

Depending on your budget and needs either combination (mSATA+spinner or SSD+spinner or mSATA+SSD+spinner) would work. To use an mSATA as a boot drive you will need one that is at least 40GB. Today there are numerous brands of mSATA on the market, but since my experience is with the Intel 310 series I can't say anything remotely intelligent about the others. While I have been happy with mine, I would not have purchased the mSATA drive especially if I had to pay for the computer (my employer paid for mine ) and instead put the money towards more memory and a larger capacity and reliable SSD. Last year when they gave me the machine they did not have enough in the budget to get me a proper SSD and so just gave me the stock config that they had brought in bulk from Lenovo. On this forum many are partial to the Samsung 830 or the Crucial M4 because of their quality and depending on your needs you could pair a an SSD with a spinning drive. The main benefit would be that it will give a simpler system than mine (which has three HDDs); it will be speedy and if used properly (i.e. never defrag an SSD, disable hibernation, etc.) a good SSD should work well for several years.

 

Somehow I didn't think that I could just take out the hard drive and swap in the ssd Kind of a no brainer.

Thanks guys, I'm shopping around for SSDs, fallowing your suggestions.