Thinkpad t400 SSD yes/no?

Hello, I am going to be purchasing a thinkpad t400 this weekend and I have one question. I have done a lot of research on SSD versus standard HDD and I still can't decide which route I should take. 64GB is suitable for my needs because I have a server I save most things on and a desktop. Money is also not really an issue. My major concern is life time. I use my computer 12 hours a day and I am concerned that I will quickly reach the write limit of the drive. I was wondering if my concerns are valid and if so how long does a standard SSD last? Thanks in advance.

 

SSDs have not been out long enough to really answer your question from aggregate experiences...but if you go with a SLC it should be pretty sufficient. The SLC technology also has the least issues as far as SSD controllers go, however I believe lenovo might have started using MLC SSDs...but someone else would have to confirm that, since I have an SLC from lenovo from last fall.

 

I have Samsungs newest MLC 256 GB SSD in my T400 and I haven't had any problems with it.

 

Used my SSD for two years now and going strong. The model is Samsung SLC SSD. I used my computer about 15 hours a day every single day.

 

I really enjoyed reading the anandtech articles on SSD...if you are interested in how they work and the lifespan issues then I recommend you spend a few hours reading the articles here. Their conclusion as of today is easy to summarize: just buy the Intel X25M

 

Not really a viable option for everyone so I think the "cheap" samsung SLC 64gig is good as well.

 

Are you going to be running Vista or XP? If you are going to be running Vista, are you sure 64GB is enough for you? Expect atleast half of that to be used up by Vista. My 160GB HDD only had 100GB of free space when I received the computer from Lenovo. You can, however, delete some of the ThinkVantage software as well as delete the recovery partition. Doing so should free up 20GB or so. My advice is to get the 160GB 7200 RPM HDD and wait a year or two for the prices to come down on the solid-state drives. The 7200 RPM HDD is quite impressive IMHO.

 

Thank you all for such speedy responses. I am not too worried about the disk size being suitable, I am going to probably reimage the system out of box and a cleaned out system should run fine on 64GB. My fear is that in 2 years or even less the disk will fail. I have heard that flash technology has a limited write count but I am not sure if it would ever catch. I feel it is important to note I do quite a lot of programming on my laptop and run SQL server developer on it, which I believe does quite a bit of writing and reading. I also ghost my systems once every 6 months or so. Because my hdd will be under such heavy use will ssd be unfeasible.

 

SLC technology is very reliable and will easily last longer than your laptop. For your purposes look at getting an enterprise level SLC SSD since money is no object and you require the quality that comes with those drives.

 

The original poster was worried about performance and longevity and said the cost was not a problem.

 

I have a Samsung 64GB SLC drive in my x200T (the model Lenovo used before switching to MLC drives). I have been extremely satisfied with its performance and power consumption (see the link in my sig), and have had ZERO PROBLEMS.

If you are concerned about longevity, then SLC is probably the way to go (at least 10 times the write cycles of MLC). I have the Samsung MCCOE64g8OVA and it is a very good drive and can be had for a decent price on Newegg. If price is no object, then the Intel x-25 E (or x-18 E) is also a fantastic choice.

 

!!! I just bought a T500 with 64gb SSD. I did not consider the size of vista! Oh boy

 

Should still be enough space for most programs and your basic files. Bulk storage on the network .

 

I would recommend that you burn your recovery DVDs and delete the Q: partition as that is probably 6-8GB right there.

You may also want to consider disabling the pagefile, or setting a small starting point for the pagefile (e.g. 256MB) and letting it expand dynamically. I prefer the second approach (fragmentation of the pagefile isn't a problem on an SSD) and saves me another 4GB (RAM size) on my install.

Disabling hibernate is also worth considering as by default Windows will reserve a hiberfil.sys equal to the amount of RAM you have installed.

Once you do those things and keep bulk media storage on an external drive, it is quite easy to make 64GB (or even 32GB) work for Vista and your programs.

 

My 2 cents on SSDs...

I always thought they were too expensive, until that cheap supertalent 128gb model came out that broke the $300 mark. It's rates at 100mb Read and 40mb Write. Very slow by today's standard, and that was only 6 months ago

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded to the OCZ Vertex that is easily 2-3 times faster across the board on benchmark specs, but to be honest, I can't tell much (if any) difference between the two in day to day use. They are both SO FAST that they are both great to have and use. Even if I had to replace them within a year because of their lifespan I really wouldn't care, to me they make "computing" just so much better. There was a great review on NBR on the OCZ Vertex and I really liked the summary at the end where the reviewer states that one of the biggest advantages of SSD's isn't necessarily the read/write speeds, but it's really the lack of latency. If you look at how many files requests are going on in windows (under the hood using a tool like filemon) you'll appreciate just how much disk access there is. That's really where SSD's shine in my opinion. Sure, max throughput and top speed is important if you're transferring large files around, but for just working on your laptop day in and day out, almost any SSD drive is going to a big plus.

 

I would not worry about the lifetime of the SSD so much. Mechanical HDD's have limited lifetimes too. In my experience mechanical drives are generally the most common thing to fail on a laptop. You should be backing up anyway, and as others have already said, they have not experienced any problems with the SSDs.

Just be sure to get a decent drive, and not a bargain brand. The drive that comes from lenovo is samsung, and is very good. If you do an aftermarket upgrade yourself good drives are samsungs, mtrons, intel, OCZ Vertex(I would not get any other OCZ drives as their performance is suspect).

 

I hope everyone is still aware that the only SSDs worth getting in terms of at least being faster than any mechanical hard drive are Intel's, OCZ Vertex(with latest firmware)/indilix controllers, ones with samsung controllers, with samsung being the worse (when full, performs much slower than regular hard drives with random writes) All other ones are ABSOLUTELY NOT WORTH IT DO NOT GET JMICRON WARNING WARNING CAUTION

Intel is most reliable as they've gone through tons of testing and research, which is why when theirs came out blew all the competition away

according to anandtech, intel said that their MLC ssd's can handle 100gb writes a day for 5 years without data loss.

It's the random read/writes that matter!!!