Staying in the ThinkPad family

Some will know that my next company issued laptop would be an HP Elitebook instead of the current ThinkPad. Even if the Elitebook is a very nice business laptop, it is still kind of sad, considering my love for ThinkPads.

However, seems some of us at work have managed to sway the IT guy in the right direction and hence my next work notebook will be a ThinkPad anyway! An X201 with SSD (spent a lot of time arguing for the SSD ). So it seems I will stay in the ThinkPad family after all - even for work

The SSD part is extremely important for me - in fact so much that all my current personal laptops (X301, X61 Tablet, X201 Tablet) all have SSDs in them.

As they say, once you go SSD, you will never go back to HDD. At least not me.

 

I agree that once you use SSD's for a while, switching back to a HDD based notebook you'll notice things become quite slow and suddenly become impatient! Though I'll only consider a SSD if in combination with a HDD for storage space, the SSD capacity is just too small at the moment within a reasonable price range. I got two OCZ Vertex's lying doing nothing as 60GB is not really big enough to be used on its own!

Returning back to the ThinkPad theme, once you have a ThinkPad (well for me) it's hard to adjust with a different brand. I tried a 2010 Dell Latitude E6410 and I failed to adapt miserably so I traded it for a 2008 ThinkPad R61e - and I couldn't be more happier to be honest! It just feels natural to me, the keyboard and the trackpoint especially. So looks likely I be sticking with the ThinkPad brand for a while!

 

I use 60GB in X200 and works just fine for me. In fact, I think buying 120GB SSD for m17x might have been too much. I typically use ~80GB of it. I'd have an external hard drive or another 500GB HD in the dock bay if I didn't have another laptop and an old desktop with more storage space.

 

X25-M 160GB seems like good balance between still having ssd and quite a lot of space for storage

 

I have 2 x Intel 160GB SSDs and 1 x Samsung 128GB SSD. More than sufficient to carry around all my vital files as well as some entertainment.

For major storage/back up and high transfer speeds I use a 500GB drive with the UltraBay SATA caddy and pop it into the UltraBase. I have one caddy for the X61 Tablet UltraBase and 1 caddy for the X200 UltraBase.

With this combination I get average transfer speeds between SSD and HDD of around 70MB/s. When I only transfer around a 700MB-1GB file, it only takes around 5 seconds - equaling transfer at around 200 MB/s (due to burst mode I guess). So much faster than USB transfer - but it seems USB 3.0 will drastically change this.

For the X301 I put the 500GB drive in a USB enclosure or use my über USB back up drive containing a desktop HDD.

 

JabbaJabba, looks like good storage solution

 

Congrats on your IT guy's change of heart. I wish I could sway my company toward Thinkpads rather than the Elitebook series. Being in IT, I won't get one anyway, but getting away from HP for new hardware would be a big plus.

 

What is it with HP and their offset keyboard and trackpad on the "Elitebook" line? Everything is set too far to the left.

 

Like this quote.

Coz it happen to me as well.

 

I would say that if you didn't stick to ThinkPads yet, you propably do not know what you loose

I used to have Dell D430, a nice 12" ultraportable, yet again, it doesn't quite much up to the thinkpad standards of X200s which I have after replacing D430 with it. In every way except for the screen, thinkpads are better.

Not to mention that feeling that you have the ugliest, black brick-like laptop in the world Not as shiny as HPs or other Dells etc..