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It's much faster. When I say much, the performance boost is very noticeable. Programs open faster, boot times and shutdown times are shortened by many seconds.
It's a performance boost that you can actually feel on a daily basis doing the most basic and ordinary tasks. It's not like you have to push the limit to feel the performance like CPU upgrades.
But FYI ,mSATA 40gb has slower speeds than the 80gb ones.
I'm quite new to this... if I just got a new thinkpad laptop with both HDD and mSATA, will Windows 7 ask which drive I want to install to, or would it automatically install to HDD? Or do I have to manually reinstall windows 7?
You get to choose between the two during setup.
In bios, you can set the boot drives(which drive to load the WP7 from). Lenovo doesn't offer mSATA just yet, so you will have to wait and see for that.
Also, from what Lenovo has been doing for the past years, their upgrades are ridiculously expensive. Even if they start offering mSATA option, you will be better off buying the mSATA separately. Thinkpads are one of the most user-upgradeable and -friendly laptops out there.
You can buy Inte's Soda Creek 310 mSATA ssd's.
The 40gb one is in stock in Newegg, but the 80gb is not(estimated to arrive the 18th)
The mSATA ssd is relatively new, so it's not so widely available. I believe most are being distributed to PC vendors, not to end-users.
Actually, I just read from another post that the Intel 310 is an older generation of mSATA with up to only 3Gb/s. There's newer SSD drives that's suppose to be 6Gb/s, which the X220 is suppose to be able to support, but they won't do that till late 2011.
I heard you could use other 6Gb/s SSD with spacer mod to make that work for X220.
Does anyone know which SSD have 6Gb/s interface? And does it actually show 6Gb/s on the X220 since Lenovo didn't say anything about current X220 support?
mSATA drives do not support 6GB/s at all; they're hardware-wise limited to 3GB/s. But it doesn't make that much of a difference, I don't think those drives are saturating the bandwith yet.
It does make a difference for real SSD's, and newer Lenovo laptops do support the 6Gb/s interface.
there are a couple sata 3 (6GB/s) ssds in the market. i believe they are the crucial, ocz vertex 3, and the intel 510 (uses a marvell) controller.
i would just get an intel 320 sata 2 since they seem to be the most bang/buck and are very reliable. it also does hardware encryption if you're into that as well.
I just got my x220 a week ago and managed to snag an 80gb intel 310 soda creek before newegg ran out of them. Setup was incredibly easy, no updates to the bios or anything. Just put it in, formatted both drives and reinstalled windows 7 64 without bloatware. It runs very fast, at least as fast as my old x-25m. Computer starts up in 15 seconds. I can transfer files from the ssd to the 250gb internally at about 90mbps averaged, over 140mbps for small files using burst transfer. I've been using ssds in all my computers for the last two years and it's very true that once you use an ssd as your boot drive, you'll never go back to a conventional drive.
Renice X3 1.8" Micro SATA SSD 120GB $258.50 120GB $2.15 per GB
MyDigitalSSD 128GB 50mm mSATA SSD $279.99 128GB $2.19 per GB
Intel 310 mSata SSD 80GB $189.00 80GB $2.36 per GB
Renice X3 1.8" Micro SATA SSD 240GB $579.00 240GB $2.41 per GB
Intel 310 mSata SSD 40GB $99.00 40GB $2.48 per GB
MyDigitalSSD 32GB 50mm mSATA SSD $79.99 32GB $2.50 per GB
Renice X3 1.8" Micro SATA SSD 60GB $157.95 60GB $2.63 per GB
Of course right now none are in stock anywhere.
The other thing I'm debating is whether to do a clean install or a backup/restore from the HDD factory install. There are differing opinions on which is the right approach:
onewolf, you've obviously did more research than me on mSATA drive. The Intel SSD is suppose to be the 'older generation' (3Gb/s), and there's suppose to be new generation up to 6Gb/s. I'm not sure whether X220 can support it, but Lenovo has yet to confirm till late 2011.
In any case, if they all are the new generation then I think it's worth spending a bit of money. If the X220 can support the new generation I personally wouldn't buy the Intel 310 mSATA.
I also don't have any clue whether all the mSATA SSD are the same size or not? If not, it's better to find out which fits and which needs spacer mod IMO.
They don't even call it that, but its the only kind of slots and cards being made so far.
Due to the limit of how much current gen flash you can cram on a tiny card, its not really a issue. There are not enough channels to break the speed limit yet.
Electrically its not a big deal to do 6gbps over a short distance of pcb, so "2.0" will show up eventually. But likely not in 2011, so who cares if you're buying this year.
I thought that mSATA SSDs fit in the WWAN slot while 1.8" and 2.5" SSDs fit in the hard drive bay? Aren't we talking about two totally different things here?
Yes he's talking about two different things. He is a little behind on basic research. Another 20 minutes perusing this forum will help. I *really* wish search worked on this site. I wish too they had a sub-board for X220 only.
I have a 250GB Intel 510 Series running 6Gb/s on my X220. Out of the box, it doesn't fit as it's a 9.5mm drive and the X220 has a 7mm height slot. I took the top cover off the 510 and am running it with no top cover. Doesn't seem to harm it any. I also show some performance numbers in the "Compatible drives" thread so the X220 does, indeed, support 6Gb drives (if they fit).
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
