Thinkpad T61P compatible with SSD?

I have been looking into Solid State Disks recently and I am moving more towards buying one. Only problem is I don't know what ports my laptop has and don't know if an SSD will be compatible. Are there any easy ways for looking up what connection ports my computer has since I'm not familiar with laptop connectivity?

 

You just need a 2.5inch sata or sata II SSD.

Check the SSD thread in the hardware forum. Note, the t61p is limited to sata I speeds so you will not see the full performance of some drives, but it will still be very very fast. Just make sure you don't buy a junk drive.

Good drives are Samsung, Mtron, Intel, and OCZ vertex

 

I still want to keep my current Hard Drive but I wanted to add a SSD to it.

I was looking towards the Expresscard or Mini Pcie but I don't know if I have those ports since I traditionally owned a desktop and have no idea what they look like or how to check.

 

That's certainly possible, and I assume that you intend to boot off the SSD and use the HDD as a data storage drive.

I would recommend putting the SSD into the 2.5" bay and your HDD into the UltraBay slim SATA HDD adapter (you will have to swap out the optical drive). You can use any 2.5" SATA SSD natively, or a 1.8" micro-SATA SSD with Lenovo's SSD adapter.

 

I'm really unsure about this, but i think i remember reading that the t61 expresscard or minipcie ports are really slow for ssds. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong.

I do know that if you get the ultrabay hard drive adapter for your dvd/cdrom drive, you can put the drive there and will be just as fast as if you put it in your primary hard drive bay.

 

The physical expresscard and miniPCIe ports can handle a lot higher speeds than most SSDs out there, it's the actual SSDs for expresscard/miniPCIe that have slow speeds. Plus, I don't think you can boot off of expresscard or miniPCIe.

 

Wow heres a noob question. I just tried to open my bios to see if I could boot from those ports and the ony prompt I get at restart is to push the blue thinkvantage button but when I do It takes me directly to Rescue and Recovery. So how do I get to my Bios? I know I've done it before but can't remember.

 

alright, so can anyone tell what connection ports these are?

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He doesn't have to worry about that.
To do a pefectly clean install, he will have to worry about deleting main directories. What is your laptop? How much space do you have on it?

 

That looks like a picture of your stacked ExpressCard and PC Card Slots...
I have a T61p and the two slots on mine are PcCard on the bottom and express card on the top.

 

Lenovo Thinkpad T61P Model:6460-RF4

160GB (143GB formatted) hardrive with 17.5GB left of free space.

 

I don't see any PC card Solid State Drives. This means if I want to keep my HDD I'm going to have to get an Express card SSD? Also, is express card the same thing as PCIexpress?

(I have been looking at Express card connection and PCIe Mini connection SSD cards)

 

Expresscard uses the notebook motherboard's PCIe but generally, if you are looking at products, they are different. PCIe products tends to be for desktops.

 

The closest you're going to get for a PC card SSD is getting a PcCard that is an adapter for like CompactFlash or SD. You "could" put a CF Card into a PcCard adapter and when you slide that into your card slot it will pop up as a drive letter. They make some decent capacity CF cards, but the raw performance is that great so your mileage may vary depending upon your needs. You can also get a flash drive for your expresscard slot.

When you use the term "SSD" most people think "Disk Drive" as opposed to "Flash Drive" so sometimes things get lost in translation.

You could also get an SSD drive and plug it into an Ultraslim Bay Adapter and take your CD Rom drive out and slide in the Ultraslim Bay Adapter with SSD drive essentionally giving you two hard drives. You sacrifice the CDRom, but you gain a larger SSD drive instead of going flash based in one on your card slots.

 

Whats your goal for having an SSD?

If your looking for a faster computer the only safe and consistant way to do that is to replace your harddrive with a 2.5" SSD or a 1.8" SSD in a 2.5" caddy.

If your looking for additional space you can use your express card slot, SD card reader, or get a ultrabay HDD caddy.

 

I don't thinks that's an issue because these drives are made to replace the old drives. You do have the option of making one drive the system disk and the other drive being secondary but you do this through the other side(end).
-Renee

 

It really depends on why you want this ssd like aurora mentioned. Most get SSDs for performance/speed, which in that case put it in your main hdd bay or in the ultrabay.

 

I have an answer to this...we're both right.

In the tech article you quoted, the article itself was about test memory. Yes and they we're testing capacity of 8 megs. I was correct for the amount of memory at the time. On July 5th, 2008 I was knocked out and am still in the hosptal over that. You are correct if that memory is out. I was correct for the time I had a t61p.

-Renee