compatible SSD with Lenovo T420?

Hi guys,

After googling and chatting w/ Lenovo sales people who unfortunately need to get back to me after some research, I've managed to get a headache.

It seems it's hard to find SSD drives for the T420s because it has a strange 7mm sized slot.

The T420 has a 9mm slot which I'm guessing is more standard. I am wondering does that mean the T420 can fit any 2.5" SSD?

Thank you kindly.

 

Yes, the T420 can take regular 2.5" SSD's.

 

Sweeet. Thanks goofball!

 

You might want to look at the mSATA drive too. That way you could keep your platter drive in the bay for extra storage.

 

Do you guys happen to know if the T420 is SATA II or SATA III?

 

It uses the Cougar Point chipset, so it should have SATA 3.0 compatibility.

 

If that's what's putting you off the T420s, don't be misguided. All the good drives (Intel and Crucial) come spacers that remove to become a 7mm drives.

 

The Intel drives that support SATA 3.0 (510 series) don't have spacer shims. Not that the 320 series drives are slouches either. I enjoy mine. 15 sec cold boots.

 

People blindly get hung up on SATA speeds. For most uses there won't be any difference. The Intel 320 and Crucial M8 (SATA 3) are both great drives. If I wanted a 7mm ssd I'd take either, whichever was cheaper, without regard to the interface speed.

 

I think the latest Samsung SSD is 7mm and SATA 3. However, it might not have reached the shelves yet.

However, there's a lot more to the boot process that reading files off the SSD as fast as they can move. Most of the effort is in processing the info to set up Windows. Soluto will show you where the time goes.

John

 

Thanks everyone for your replies.

Yay I have a T420 en route to me and I plan to swap out the platter drive w/ a SSD (probably OCZ Velocity 3) when it arrives.

Does anyone happen to know can I use the 'rails' that come with the T420 or do I need to get Lenovo to ship me different sized rails?

From what I can see from online documentation the Vertex 3 is 9.3mm high; and the platter drive in the Lenovo is 9.5mm high, and both are 2.5".

I'm looking at this manual:
http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/0a60007.pdf

and this spec sheet:
http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-vertex-3-sata-iii-2-5-ssd.html

Thank you kindly

 

They're the same as far as I know.

I'd ask why would not get the mSATA drive, which would allow you to keep the platter drive for extra storage? The difference between it and a SATA III drive is probably not noticeable in most situations.

 

Hi ZaZ,

Thanks for your reply and good question.

I never heard about mSATA until this thread but when I researched it and followed some links it seems mSATA doesn't come in capacities over 128GB or so (please let me know if I'm wrong).

The T420 is going to become my main software development machine and I need a lot of space for all the different software. Because 128GB is not enough I'm forced to go to 240GB (next size up it seems in the SSD world). This of course will cost me $$$ and makes me a bit sad.

I suppose I could put the platter drive (after I buy an adapter from Lenovo it seems) into the ultrabay but then I would lose the DVD drive, which may be OK since I can swap them in/out (I assume).

 

What about eSATA?

 

You're right in that the biggest Intel mSATA drive is 80GB. Perhaps the next round of drives, Paint Creek I think, will offer more capacity. A mSATA SSD plugs into the miniPCI slot on the motherboard. You can use it as a boot drive for speed, but still retain the platter based drive in the main bay for storage. In that set-up you could keep your optical drive as well.