I'm on Lenovo's EPP through my company. As a result, I was looking at purchasing a w530.

I was looking at configuring RAID in my laptop. I don't want to have lenovo do it because they charge for the bay adapter and I loose the dvd drive. I probably wouldn't configure it for RAID for a long time either; I just want to have the option. I was told that lenovo has two different motherboards they put in the w530s. One supports RAID, and the other does not. If you do not have lenovo configure RAID for your laptop, they put in the motherboard that does not support RAID.

Can anyone confirm this? Thanks.

Seems to be the case. Some confusion because when the W700/W500 line came out, you could add in RAID yourself after the purchase. However, on the newer models, you do have to order it with/without RAID. So, you can't do what you wanna do, you have to pony up $$$ for extra stuff you don't want, in order to get a motherboard w/RAID. Numerous posts on this, if'n you wanna search a bit.

That's the general online opinion I've been getting. However, I've talked to both lenovo technical support and sales. Both of them have stated I can set up RAID myself. I would not be surprised if they were just saying that though and had no idea.
This document:
http://www.lenovo.com/psref/pdf/tabook.pdf
shows a lot of the technical aspects of the thinkpad. If you scroll through the w530 models, they all have the exact same chip set, which is what determines whether or not it supports RAID.

Do you have any hard evidence to show the mobos are different? Perhaps a lenovo part number?

You need to search the W520 posts, where you'll find actual cases of people who've run into the RAID/No RAID mboard issue.

At this point, it's -likely-, but not set in stone that this carries over to the new W530. BUT, since people don't yet have these in their grubby little hands, we just don't know yet.

Same thing applies to your post on this topic over in the Notebookreview forum/board. You'll get(and have gotten) the same answer there, as this is all anyone knows.

Relying on 'Lenovo Tech Support' is a dead end, so get over that one. Tabook urls/pdfs are often wrong on the minor issues, too, so don't get your hopes up there, either.

If you don't want to believe anyone yet, then wait it out for a while until someone discovers 'The TRUTH' about this one...

One other thing - you could try taking names/ids of some Lenovo reps and go ahead and order whatever you want. If it turns out you can't do what you want, you can go through the process to return the laptop and probably get most/all of your $$$ back. Search on that one, too, as I don't know the details on returning a purchase, but many have posted about that. However, you're looking at a few weeks and probably some hassles for all of that to settle out. But, it would allow you verify for yourself, what the scoop is.