Thinkpad W520 Owners - mSATA Configurations

So what is your mSATA configuration in your W520 ?

Please tick a vote in the Poll

Feel free to give input on what has worked well, and not so well.

Do the drives all show up and work ok ?

Tweaks you had to make, install woes and success's ?!

Etc.......


Curious to hear from someone that has an mSATA installed (as OS) and have a HDD in the main bay, and a HDD in the Ultrabay.

I think that's the direction I will be going

 

I don't understand why you need feedback, and why you feel the need to bump this thread. You won't have any problems getting any of the drives recognized as long as your W520 and the drives are not malfunctioning. They'll all work fine, just the same as you've experienced other drives working. The mSATA drive will be limited to SATA 2 speeds IIRC but that's not a problem for loading the OS and programs.

 

I for one would like to hear from other people running mSATA with RAID before I go out and spend the money to do it myself. I'm running 1TB RAID 0 with two seagate hybrid drives and thinking about dropping in the intel 80gig...

 

Gotcha. I think, then, that your questions should be aimed specifically at experiences using RAID with drives in the main drive bay and Ultrabay, and using RAID with the Momentus XT. The latter question should probably be posted in the storage forum here.

I think you won't get many responses on your original questions because most drives will show up and work fine unless they're broken, in which case people will have switched them out, a fairly non-standard occurrence and based on which someone would probably hesitate to give you advice. You can at least assume IMHO that the drives you buy will be recognized by the system, if they're of the correct type and not broken coming from the factory, and your W520 doesn't have some rare port or other problems.

Are you wondering whether you'll see a speed increase? Just compare your RAID 0 disk benchmarks with ones from the 80 gig Intel drive. I'm thinking, from my long-ago experience with RAID 0, that you will probably see some nice increases in random reads and writes at the very least. Do you do video encoding, or if not, what's your other reason for using RAID 0, out of curiosity?

 

Why? You already have a big RAID volume. Why do you feel you need another storage device?

 

I'm accustom to the raid array on my desktop that used WD raptors and miss the fast load times. I don't wan to invest in full ssd drives and was thinking that this mSATA might be a good cost effective solution.