T420 and T420s - 2 months to ship?

I wanted to see if anyone else out there is running into the same problem we are. We ordered one T420 and three T420s laptops on May 24th. None of them has shipped to this point. The original estimated ship date was 6/17, then 6/24, then 7/6, now today it shows 7/27. Lenovo reps claim it is for the 160 GB Intel SSD drive we ordered. Two months seems like a long time to build a laptop, so was curious what others are seeing.

I have been a loyal thinkpad owner since the original 755 CSE model many years ago, but as a small business owner whose employee's T61 died back in May, I can't really afford to wait another month for a laptop.

So, I am considering my options as cancel the order and get something else (not sure what), update the order for the 128 GB SSD, which I don't think is rated as well, or swap to a standard 7200 RPM mechanical hard drive and then replace the drives myself (which I am fine doing as I am fairly technical). I am wondering how easy it is for the Lenovo hidden partition and regular drive contents to be cloned onto an SSD drive. I remember seeing a post about recommended drives for the X220, is this the same form factor or is there a separate list for the T420s?

I see what I think is the same drive (Intel 320 series) in stock on Newegg, so not sure I believe that Lenovo can't get them.

Appreciate anyone's opinion.

 

Cloning HDD to SSD is easy using Acronis or similar. That's the route I went.

The T420s is designed to use 7mm thick drives, ie the same as the X220. One can just about push a 9.5mm thick drive without the rubber rails into the slot but it's not recommended. The Intel drives have two versions, one with a spacer (to make it 9.5mm thick) and one without. For the former you need to find 4 shorter screws to hold the cover on without the spacer (although the rubber rails may do that job adequately.

John