Was my Ideapad Y580 SSD and HDD set up incorrectly?

Hey Everyone!

I got my wonderful y580 yesterday and I must say I love it!

However, I do have a few concerns. I purchased the model with the 32gb SSD and the 1TB HDD. Like others, I assumed the windows installation would be on the SSD (disk0) and the TB would be disk1. When i went to device manager I see only one disk. I understand the rapid drive technology pretty much combines both harddrives and creates one.

My concern is, it appears as if the windows installation is on the 1TB HDD rather then the SSD. Am I right? Here are some images..

Second Question

I was also thinking of purchasing either the 128GB Mushkin Atlas or the 128GB Crucial M4. I was going to install Windows on the SSD and use my TB as a datastore. Would this increase boot time/performance as opposed to the Samsung SSD that comes with the y580?


3rd Question

Noob question. I love the high def resolution. When reinstalling Windows is there a particular driver that I need to install to make sure the wonderful high-res display remains?

Thanks!

 

Welcome to the forum.

I can't advise you on the SSD setup, but I would suggest you look at this Lenovo site:

IdeaPad Y, U, V, Z and P series Laptops - Lenovo Community

Put in a search for SSD, or Partition, on that Forum, and see what you get.

 

1. No, is not setup incorrectly. Its a known bug in which the SSD does not appear in the device manager. Your Y580 came with an mSATA, that means that your Y580 is configured with rapid drive. That means Lenovo combined both drives (HDD and SSD) into a single drive. In other words you will only see one HDD. Drive D is a partition of the 1TB.

2. I don't have rapid drive so I don't know if its gonna be better. But I think the mSATA is used for cache and booting, so it might be similar... I really don't know.

3. You'll have to install all the drivers from the D partition after the clean install. Also, since you have the rapid drive stuff you'll have to "disconnect" the HDD from the SSD before installation. There is a thread on this, and here is a thread for clean installation with step by step procedure. You may one to copy the D partition on a pen drive before formatting your HDD.

Sorry for not posting the links of the threads, but it shouldn't be difficult to find.

 

Ah I see! Since the D partition was around 25 gigs I was concerned that was the actual SSD drive and it was being used for the drivers as opposed to the windows OS. The laptop boots up in 20 seconds so I guess it is set up correctly!

 

All the data is stored on your HDD in this setup. The SSD is fused with the HDD as a caching drive. Which means that it's sort of the best of both worlds (a lot faster than using an HDD). Of course, it's not as fast as a pure SSD, because data that isn't cached on the SSD will first have to be loaded from the HDD.