Second SSD in T420s?

Hello,

I purchased a T420s, base configuration. I purchased separately an Intel 320 series (160 GB) SSD and 8 GB RAM.

In order to prolong the life of the SSD, I am considering installing a small and fast mSATA drive for swapping. I am thinking Intel 311 series or perhaps something else that fellow members might recommend.

Any recommendations?

Thanks!

 

I use a mydigitalSSD 128GB in my T420s, works great. The 80GB Intel mSata works well too, I use one of those in my work laptop.

 

Do you use it as a swap/temp drive in conjunction with a primary SSD?

 

I use it at my OS drive, all software goes on there. My 256GB crucial drive houses all of my data and virtual machines. I'm not really looking at longevitity, I have a 256GB crucial drive that I beat the crap out of for the last couple years without issue at work.

 

Would Win7 see the mSATA drive as a separate disk and allow you to put the swap file there? In other words, I would like to have the OS and software on the larger Intel 320 series SSD, and the swap file on the smaller mSATA drive.

 

Yes, the mSata shows up as another drive.

 

Great, thank you!

BTW, I see you use VMs. I will use VMs too (VMWare Workstation). Do you know when the VM swaps, does it use the host's swap file or creates its own inside the disk image?

 

Swap is controlled by the OS. So if you're talking about a guest OS, the swap file will be on the guest virtual drive - if the guest OS uses a swap file.

 

Thanks! So it looks like I will have to create a second disk image on the mSATA drive for the guest OS to swap onto (assuming I keep the VM images on the primary SSD drive)

 

I installed a MydigitalSSD 128G mSATA but it does not show up as a new disk. However it does show up in the System Information of the ThinkVantage Toolbox. What should I do? I want to leave my OS in the current 160G SSD and use this additional SSD to store frequently used data.

 

Does it show up in Windows' Disk Management? (Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer management). The disk won't show up in Explorer until you have formatted it.

John

 

Thank you. I followed the steps and the drive appears in Explorer. But now the boot drive have been changed to the CD followed by the new mSATA before the original SSD. How can I set the SSD back as priority? I went into BIOS but it only allow me a temporary change.

 

IIRC, there's a BIOS option to set a one-time boot priority by pressing one of the Fn keeys at boot and there should be a boot device priority menu in the full BIOS setup.

You can also change driver letters in Disk Management, but this won't affect the boot priority.

John