T520 upgrade - mSATA or full-size SSD?

Getting a T520 with an i5-2540m and will likely add 4gb of memory for a total of 6gb. Can't decide whether to keep the HDD and get an 80gb Intel 310 mSATA, or just buy a 160gb Intel 320 and swap out the HDD.

My current notebook is 5 years old (HDD replaced 8 months ago) and I'm using just 105gb of the HDD. The extra $120 or so for the Intel 320 is a minor issue for use only as a tie-breaker. I'm a software developer doing fairly straightforward stuff, I'm not a gamer and I wouldn't keep music or photos on this machine.

My question for those in the know is whether - for performance and convenience - it is better to have everything on the one SSD, or are things pretty seamless to have the OS and programs on the mSATA and all other files on the HDD? If things are seamless, it may make sense to keep the HDD for future flexibility, and maybe keep the OS that comes with it on the HDD as a second bootable drive if the mSATA failed. (I have Windows 7 Ultimate to install on whichever drive I get.)

Thoughts? Thanks.

 

If you do not keep a lot of data within your computer, I would recommend a full-size SSD because it is cheaper, has better performance and usually has a larger storage.

Otherwise, getting a mSATA with a decent storage (80gb for OS + programs + commonly accessed data) + a HDD (1Tb 2.5 in drives can be had quite cheaply now) would be the recommended option. If I were you I would choose the mSATA because who knows how much stuff you'll have to store in the future?

 

As far as that goes, I chose to get a cheap, small mSATA for OS+programs - 64 gb - and keep all other stuff on the easy-to-upgrade-for-space HDD. I'm not sure that spending all your budget on a bigger mSATA is worth it, if it's primarily just for program and OS.

 

Thanks. Any thoughts on whether there is a noticeable performance difference between the options? For instance, with the mSATA option does pulling data files from the HDD slow things down?

 

Would be the same as if you use a regular SSD/HDD combo. The mSATA SSD is fast enough for majority of users IMO.

 

As someone who does this, I can say that there has been no noticeable slowdown for me.

I have my Users folder (Win7) on my hard drive, as well as my browser caches and profile settings ,my swap file, and temp file directories. Everything runs very nicely, and there is a measurable performance increase over just a hard drive.

 

I concur that the speeds for mSATA are probably fast enough for most of us, but inevitably there will be some differences in speed, especially when you are transferring large files. I have been told that with most of the mSATA harddisks out there (intel, renice) you can boot within 12 seocnds. that's good enough for me!

 

LoneWolf, I'm honored. Read your mSATA primer a few weeks ago and several of your posts on this subject over the past several days.

If I understand your comment, I'm surprised the browser caches, swap file and temp files are on the HDD. I've read that having the browser caches on an SSD speeds up surfing. Maybe you have some space constraints.

 

It's a personal preference; I just do it to reduce writes to the flash memory.

I also have a DOCSIS 3 cable connection at home, which is quite fast, so it's not a huge deal. I have 8GB of RAM, so swapping isn't that frequent. The only minor thing I have happen occasionally is that when I click the Start button in Win7 and go to "All Programs", there can be a delay in my program icons going from generic ones to real icons. I believe this is because I've disabled Indexing on the SSD; I may re-enable that to see if it takes care of things. Most of my frequently used programs are pinned to the Taskbar, and they aren't affected.

 

I think you should also consider the max influx of computers that can utilize mSATA drives, finding mSATA drives can be especially tough as the 310 series 80GB is often out of stock.

And the SATA SSD's are a bit cheaper per GB, for 294 on Newegg I saw awhile back you can get the 320 series 160GB which is 50% more expensive than the 80 GB but you get double the space.

 

imo, get a full size SSD and completely ditch the spindle drive if at all possible. this will give you lots of extra battery life

 

Good point, anybody know how much longer betterylife if there's no spinning disk?

 

Not all SSDs give you good battery life. One Kingston had such an aggressive GC algothrim it had horrendous battery life. Crucial tends to be lower due to the higher performance SSDs.

Your best bet is Intel or Samsung.

 

Your and my experience differ greatly. I mostly run in low power mode and there, SSD performance is slightly better for a few things like Photoshop or iTunes, but mostly it's mostly about the same as a platter drive. Now you can plug in and use the CPU at higher power state to get better SSD performance, but then you've more heat and noise. You can also do the registry tweak, which largely cure the issue, but battery life takes a pretty good hit.

Alternatively, my R60e running Mint flies regardless of whether it's running on battery or AC.

 

I have an original generation 80GB Intel X25-M SSD, and I used to get 4.5 hours on my XPS M1210 with a normal spindle disk. I now get 6+ hours on a 5 year old laptop with a 4 year old battery...

 

I admit that I run plugged in a lot. However, I've run my Scorpio Black 500GB without an SSD prior to this. It's a great drive, but it's no match for the SSD.

I still like platter drives. Until recently, I didn't have an SSD in any of my systems; the cost-per-GB was too high for my tastes, and I need a boot drive big enough to handle my apps on my desktop, so that system had a `Raptor 600GB for boot, with a terabyte Caviar Black for storage; my ThinkPad had the Scorpio. An SSD wasn't practical for my previous laptop, because I'd have needed at 256GB, and those are still very pricy. I still think an SSD is a limited solution if it's going to be your only drive, unless you're an ultralight traveler who has a modest amount of apps and data, or who uses cloud storage for most data needs.

mSATA drives made it possible for me to have two drives easily in my new T420, so I could have inexpensive, HDD data storage, but use an SSD for boot and apps. I don't have quite as many apps on my ThinkPad, so a smaller SSD would be okay for me. I can only say I've been pleasantly surprised by the speed boost, so I'd guess our experiences do differ.

 

battery life aside, another thing to consider is the noise that an hdd produces. this was the main reason I returned the msata and got an SSD instead. the aftermarket WD was so loud that I thought I would rather install an SSD and use an external drive to store data that is not frequently used.

 

Heat and noise are in my opinion the two biggest benefits of a SSD. I have to say the Hitachi drive in my X220i is pretty quiet.

 

Not the faster read/write speeds and instant bootup?

I never really noticed heat/noise with traditional mechanical hard drives, perhaps I'm just not bothered by it.

 

Did you not see post #14?

Smaller notebooks tend to not shield much noise in my experience.

 

Hrm well again maybe I am completely oblivious to noise. My Latitude 13's 5400 rpm Toshiba drive was silent and did not vibrate. The only real hard drive noise that bothers me is those 10k Raptor drives and clicking hard drives.