Which ram and SSD to get?

I am strongly considering buying a T420s and I am wanting to get 8 gb of ram and a bigger SSD. I am sure the ram from lenovo is overpriced so I was just going to buy another 4gb stick from newegg or something and put it in the second ram slot. My question is will any ram work or which stick is most popular among people adding ram to their thinkpad? Also, what is a good SSD that is around 160gb or maybe a bit bigger?

I also thought about exchanging the main hdd for a SSD and then putting my files and things on a SD card of some sort that I would keep in the system. Does this work well?

Last but not least, I am wondering how the GPU will perform compared to my current GPU in my T510?

 

The T420s will only take 7mm high 2.5'' HDD's, so most regular SSD's won't fit. Although there are ways to mod a regular SSD to make it shorter, ymmv depending on the brand of SSD. If you do replace the main HDD with an SSD, get a harddrive caddy and put the old HDD in there for file storage. Read/write to an SD card is so much slower its not worth it.

As for SSD brands, Intel, Crucial and Samsung are the top 3 manufacturers right now from a reliability/speed stand point. Any ram will work, for mine I added 4GB of Crucial ram. I'll leave it so someone else to answer the GPU question.

 

The HD3000 integrated GPU is stronger than the Nivida NVS3100 in your T510. Especially, when using 2 RAM Sticks. Considering they "only cost double" the amount, I would consider getting 2 8GB Sticks to get an overall of 16GB of RAM.

 

Intel, Crucial and Samsung are the brands you can't go wrong. Maybe Kingston too.
However, IMHO Corsair, Patriot and Mushkin offer almost the same performance for a better deal. I've personally bought 240Gb Corsair Force 3 series SSD and couldn't be happier ever since (especially the decision to go for 240Gb rather than 120Gb).

 

Don't forget about the mSATA SSD option on the T420s. If you don't need WWAN that'll allow you to install the mSATA drive to use as the boot drive for speed and keep the platter drive in the main bay for storage.

 

ZaZ,

Seen the new Mushkin mSATA?

 

I did see it the other day, but I've not used one.

 

Wow, that looks nice. But so far I read that mSATA is limited to 3.0Gbps - but the Mushkin specs says 560MB/s, that's 50% more. Am I missing something?

 

mSATA is limited to 3 gig speeds in the current ThinkPads. It is not limited in my Samsung Series 9 notebook and I wouldn't expect that limitation in the Ivy Bridge ThinkPads that are coming.

 

I doubt the SATA II limit makes any noticeable difference in performance.

 

IB only has 2 ports for 6Gb/s - so it depends if they use one for the optical bay again or not.
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