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    W520 Ultrabay SSD recommendations and settings help

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by carl_d, Jul 30, 2011.

  1. carl_d

    carl_d Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hi all

    Ive just ordered a rather lovely W520 which should be arriving in 3 weeks just in time for my new job! This is my first step into the magical world of SSDs and I plan to have 2 on board - 1 for OS and 1 for VHDs.

    Being new to SSDs there are a few questions i have before pulling the trigger on the drive.... please help!

    1 - Which SSD to people think is currently providing best bang per buck at 250GB size for the ultrabay - Cruclal C300, M4, OCZ Agility3, OCZ vertex3 max OIPS, intel, etc

    2 - do people think IOPS or Sequencial speeds would be best for large (c.60-80Gb) VMs

    3 - i've pre-ordered it with lenovos 128GB SSD in mainbay for OS/APPs (yeah I know I could've done it cheaper myself but its company money!), are there any performance tweeks recommended to get the best out of this (I dont want RAID, as my secondary drive is hosting VHDs and I want it completely separate from OS)

    3 - I've seen loads of concerns about disk lockup due to LPM. is this an across the board issue or only some SSDs some of the time? is the registry fix on this the definitive fix for the issue or is there more?
     
    carl_d, Jul 30, 2011
    #1
  2. huberth

    huberth Notebook Deity

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    Please define VHD. (Virtual Hard Disk? Video High Density (VHD) - a videodisc format marketed predominantly in Japan by JVC. ?)

    1. I recommend Intel SSDs for their reliability. I have 2 Intel 510s in a RAID0 configuration and had no problems with them at all (except for the warm-reboot issue with the W520 - but that is not really Intel's fault and I am sure Lenovo will eventually get around fixing it)

    3. The Intel SSD Toolbox made a few recommendations, which I followed (disable SuperFetch and PreFetch in Windows 7 - this is not for performance, but longevity. There is a long discussion about it going on here: http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/30017-prefetch-ssds-8.html). Windows 7 is SSD aware and turns off the defragmenter. I also deleted the hibernation file. All these are longevity tweaks.
    And I turned on the SSD write cache in RST. This increases write performance.
    Intel published a guide: http://download.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/newusersguide.pdf

    3. I did not have to do the LPM tweak with the Intel 510
     
    huberth, Jul 30, 2011
    #2
  3. carl_d

    carl_d Notebook Enthusiast

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    I meant Virtual hard disks :)

    thanks for the other responses, I'm tempted down the road of Intel drives for reliability.
     
    carl_d, Jul 30, 2011
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  4. sgogeta4

    sgogeta4 Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Samsung and crucial are just as good as the intel. Depending where you live, just check which is best priced.
     
    sgogeta4, Jul 30, 2011
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