I want to put in an SSD into my W520.

Will it handle SATA III or should I stick with SATA II?

Also, what brands of SSDs do you recommend?

Your 2.5" drive bay should be SATA III. From what I understand (I might be wrong on this), the ODD bay should also be SATA III.

You'll definitely see a nice boost in performance with a SATA III drive over a SATA II. If your vendor of choice has a SATA III drive that has been reviewed well, I'd say go for it.

Me personally, I am going with a 512gb Crucial M4 SSD (SATA III) to replace the 500gb drive that will be in the W520 that I will order later this week.

I'm also considering either the 240GB Patriot Pyro SE or 256GB Samsung 830 SATA III SSDs for my W520. Good luck with your upgrade.

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The real benefit of a SSD for most uses is the near instantaneous seek times, not the throughput. That won't change going from SATA II to III as they're all .1ms. Only things that put a heavy load on the controller like copying and pasting are likely to benefit from the move to SATA III. Typical notebook usage does not put a heavy load on the controller.

I might suggest if you're not using WWAN, picking up a mSATA SSD. A mSATA SSD is a small SSD that plugs into the miniPCI slot on the motherboard. Once installed it's seen as another hard drive. The benefit of this arrangement is you can install the OS on the mSATA for speed and keep the platter drive in the main bay for storage where speed is not as important. I have this setup on my X220i. It's quite slick and much more cost effective than a 512GB SSD.

I was originally going to put an Intel 320 80GB mSATA card in and keep the 500gb spinning disk, but I decided to just make things simple and just replace the spinning disk (to be used as an UltraBay backup drive) with the M4 512GB.

Cost isn't a concern right now...

Well, cost is a concern for me - Lol! I just ordered my 256GB Samsung 830 from Newegg on sale for $299.99!

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If cost if no option you should still get a 128gb msata for your OS. Let me tell you why.
If you have your OS and Work drive on the same disk your 512ssd, you run into the problem of bottleneck if you try to massive read and write on the same disk. With your OS on a msata you open up the bandwith for your work drive and cause non of your software and OS will ever need to run off the work drive.
This way you get 250mb r/w on your OS drive.
And 500mb r/w on your work drive.
So in the end you should buy both the 512 ssd, and a 128gb msata.

Thank you for for the post, but honestly, the mSATA interface is a greater bottleneck than just running everything on a 2.5" SSD. Also, if you're constantly pushing 250+MB/s on your drives, you don't need a laptop, you need a server with an attached SAN.

Yes, cost was not a limiting factor in the build of this laptop. That being said, I'm not going to spend money on something that most likely will offer no perceivable benefit.

The setup I have is plenty fast for what I need. *shrugs* This isn't my first computer configuration rodeo.