mSata or PCIe Mini SSD Help...

I have the ideapad Y560p and I'm attempting to set up a 64g SSD msata drive... I have it installed and my operating system installed on it but my laptop will not boot directly to it. I have to tell it to boot to the sata drive (which houses the OEM OS) then I get the option of which OS to boot to. At that point, I can boot to the msata but my problem is that I am wanting to boot directly to the msata so that I can swap out my sata drive but it seems like the MBR is on the sata drive instead of the msata sdd.

Does anyone have any help in this area?

Thanks in advance!
Shawn Ames

 

Alright... I got it going.

Here is my journey... I purchased the Y560p. As well as this mSata drive:

MyDigitalSSD 64GB 50mm Bulletproof mSATA SSD | My Digital Discount

I attempted to remove the spinning sata drive and install the mSata SSD but the Win7 disks I have are upgrade only therefore, I could not get the machine to boot straight to them.

So I put the 500gb drive back in and eventually I upgraded (with fresh install) windows 7 ultimate over the Home Premium. Once I got all the drivers installed, I re-inserted the mSata SSD and utilized MiniTool Partition Wizard from Download.com to copy the boot drive and system drive over to the SSD. Once I made the boot drive on the SSD active I shut down the machine and removed the spinning drive. I then went into bios and changed the boot order so it will boot to the SSD over the spinning drive in the future and restarted the machine. The master boot record still wasn't quite right so I used a startup repair disk I had made from a running machine with x64Ultimate. The startup repair did it's deal the laptop booted SUPER fast to the mSata / Mini PCIe SSD drive. Right at a 20 second boot for sure.

Software now loads CRAZY fast installing software from the hard disk feels wrong it is so fast.

I have since installed a 7200rpm 750gb drive as a storage drive and I getting ready to configure the machine as outlined here to save the SSD from getting filled up too fast:

How to: Setup SSD boot drive with secondary Hard disc optimization - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net

I can't wait to install Adobe Production CS4 to see how it runs from the SSD. Also sofware like Pro Tools should be a load of fun! This machine is a beast!

Related to the mSata drive, there are 2 open PCIe Mini or mSata drives but the mSata drive only shows up in the boot menu if it is in the one near the wireless controller. I need to look into what the other slot is intended for but the mSata drive does not work right if it is there.

 

mSATA is not the same as PCIe Mini. They are form-compatable, but not the same interface. Only one of the PCIe Mini slots is mSATA compatible.

 

There isn't a ton of info online about it. That makes since though and explains why on one of the slots worked...

 

You had two open slots? How is that possible? I was under the impression a WIFI card would be in one of them.

 

There are 3 total. I thought the same thing...

 

Ah, duh. I'm an idiot. I forgot my machine has a silly analog modem card, too. Yea, they should label the mSATA capable slot somehow.

 

Or even notaite it in the manual... I called lenovo and tiger direct and neither one had any clue what I was talking about...

 

Glad it worked out for you. I'd like to hear how the ideapad performs with CS4. I did some tests in CS5, I'm wondering if the SSD had more to do with the speed improvements than the CPU.

Primitive But Effective: Lenovo W520 for Sony Vegas Pro 10 and Adobe After Effects CS5 - Part 6

 

We could be brothers separated at birth... I use Vegas alongside cs4 all the time (thought I was a looser for doing so) and I'm a dslr video nerd. (of the gh2/1 variety....). I also have a i7 920 desktop ill be comparing this to. Here is a little video I tweeted of the start up time of some creative suite stuff... Yfrog.us/Jyyr7gz since I'm using cs4 I won't see the benefits of extra ram. and since I'll be working on files that are on the spinning disk I simply hope the machine will be more stable and function well in the background. I'm sure I'll be doing some test. So far all I have rendered is a 3 minute motion graphic countdown video... At 720p 29.9x fps... It rendered in less than 9 minutes which has me super excited.

 

Well, even the new FCP is starting to behave like Vegas. It's still the quickest full featured NLE I've used. It's so sweet to have it load in under 10 seconds alongside the Creative Suite. The only thing slowing it down is the hard drive storing the videos. Happy editing on your new Lenovo!