Samsung SSD for T500

[MikalE]

Still bringing my newer T500 up to speed.

Today I ordered another Samsung EVO 850 250GB SSD. Along with the new T9600 I installed last week I should see a bit more improvement over the spinner drive.

[MikalE]

This is an incredible performance increase. Even more noteworthy than installing one of these drives in my T520.

The T500 booted in 43 seconds even with having to scan a fingerprint.

I also installed the Turbo Boost memory module, but I can't say if this had any effect on the boot time or not.

This T500 now boots faster than my T520.

That was $80 well spent and I more than doubled my storage space.

[zephxiii]

I don't use or deploy any laptop without SSD!

[thinkpadcollection]

I don't use or deploy any laptop without SSD!

Easier to said that, except for many people does not have budget for SSD especially ongoing too high price problem. 3 years ago I purchased EVO 850 250GB for about 90 CDN which is reasonable. But not anymore till price COMES down once again is needed. What more, I'm not happy about M.2 128GB SSD 2242 length prices (can be over 70CDN currently even from ebay, because I might need to upgrade chromebook's paltry 32GB Acer C720 and C740 series.

My suggestion for spinners: Anyone with small budget can had is better performance is 2 platter platform like HGST 1TB 7200rpm 32MB, Toshiba's 2 platters 1TB 5400prm problem is 8MB buffer, and 750GB (the one with "7575" in Hitachi model number), There are few 3 platter platforms 1.5TB Hitachi/HGST 5400rpm, 2TB samsung/seagate 5400 rpm with 32MB buffer aka M9T model, (better throughput due to appox per 667GB platters), finally HGST's newest 7mm PMR 1 platter 2 heads 1TB spinning 5400rpm Z5K1 with 128MB buffer, I wish HGST came out with 2TB 2 platter model running 7200rpm with dual-chip instead of one 16 bit wide 128MB buffer (still 7mm or 9.5mm), HGST did a 7mm model 1TB with 2 platters but runs at 5400rpm still.

WD is either SMR or PMR on newest models and have to be careful not purchasing any SMR WD models as I noted about Seagate's SMR thing shortly.

Avoid Seagate 7mm 2TB model and spin slowly even at 5400rpm, they are based on SMR which is destructive read & write during writes to rebuild bands of shingled recording just to write small bytes or large bytes. Very inefficient and had Seagate 7mm 2TB model, talk about slow even tried that drive on a C2D computer, can feel the slowness.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[jdrou]

What more, I'm not happy about M.2 128GB SSD 2242 length prices

Yes unfortunately this formfactor seems to be ignored by the tier-1 manufacturers so the few companies that do make them can charge a lot more (and the smaller drives tend to be more expensive per GB too).

[ThinkRob]

Easier to said that, except for many people does not have budget for SSD especially ongoing too high price problem.

It's true that SSDs can still be expensive, but on the plus side: the performance has gotten so darn good over the last several years that even if you're getting a third-hand one from 2012, you're still going to be miles ahead of spinning rust, particularly when it comes to access times and random IOPS. I was an SSD early adopter with the Intel X25M way back when, and the amazing thing was that even the cheapest of the budget drives surpassed it within just a few short years!

In my experience, what you miss out on most when you go with an older drive is power efficiency. Each generation of SSD delivers better performance with less energy. Still, it's not usually a huge difference (especially if you're doing a lot of IO.)

[dr_st]

One thing that is to be aware of (and has in fact been discussed before) is SSD sudden death syndrome. Having experienced it first hand about a month ago, I can attest that it's annoying. One day everything works, the next day it doesn't boot, and won't even read anything from the drive. DMA errors all over the place - all the data is completely inaccessible.

The drive was 7 years old, but I have had a few friends and colleagues report similar sudden failures of drives <1 year old...

With spinners, at least 9 out of 10 times there are early signs of impending failure (reallocated sector count increasing in SMART; bad sectors destroying specific files, but rarely a significant portion of the overall data). Plenty of time to backup and replace. Conclusion: if you use an SSD, be even more proactive with backups!

[w0qj]

WOW, many thanks for your tip!
We've had our fair share of failing HDD's, but for SSD's we got lucky, our T42 (PATA) SSD failure a few years back did not induce any data loss...

One thing that is to be aware of (and has in fact been discussed before) is SSD sudden death syndrome. Having experienced it first hand about a month ago, I can attest that it's annoying. One day everything works, the next day it doesn't boot, and won't even read anything from the drive. DMA errors all over the place - all the data is completely inaccessible.

The drive was 7 years old, but I have had a few friends and colleagues report similar sudden failures of drives <1 year old...

With spinners, at least 9 out of 10 times there are early signs of impending failure (reallocated sector count increasing in SMART; bad sectors destroying specific files, but rarely a significant portion of the overall data). Plenty of time to backup and replace. Conclusion: if you use an SSD, be even more proactive with backups!

[zephxiii]

I have a fleet of 51 machines at work (98% Thinkpads) all with SSD and haven't had one die yet. I stick to Samsung, Intel, and Crucial for brands. I also stick to MLC only. But yeah always back up to another drive regardless of the drive type. You can't rely on any single drive.

Actually i did get one thinkpad off ebay that came with some no-name brand SSD which ended up being a flakey pos.

You can have SSD for pretty reasonable cost. The amount of time that's saved by SSD more than makes up the cost.