Lenovo T530

Knuckle-Head

Knuckle-Head

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 22, 2004
Messages
510
Quick note->

I passed my T61p down to my Father and ordered a refurb T530 from Lenovo Outlet.
Arrived in 3 days in perfect condition. i5 3320M, 1920x1080 screen, 4GB ram, 500GB hdd. The supplied Toshiba hdd seemed much slower than the Seagate 500GB I had in the T61p. It had to go. But wanted the space I was used to. My decision->

Added a Plextor m5m mSATA 256GB and replaced the ram with 2x8GB Corsair sticks. Ordered from eBay the daughter card for Bluetooth.

Seems like a new, completely different machine. Faster, smoother and NO LAG.

I'm happy now. The Plextor seems on par with my Sandisk Extreme in my desktop, and I still have the 500GB platter drive for storage.

Input anyone? Would you have just replaced the platter hdd with a ssd?

Thanks.
 
Congrats with your machine! I'd have added an SSD like you did rather than replace probably. Glad you like it. I'm a Thinkpad fan myself, and my previous one was also a T61p (though I upgraded to the x230 instead).
 
Knuckle-Head said:
Quick note->

I passed my T61p down to my Father and ordered a refurb T530 from Lenovo Outlet.
Arrived in 3 days in perfect condition. i5 3320M, 1920x1080 screen, 4GB ram, 500GB hdd. The supplied Toshiba hdd seemed much slower than the Seagate 500GB I had in the T61p. It had to go. But wanted the space I was used to. My decision->

Added a Plextor m5m mSATA 256GB and replaced the ram with 2x8GB Corsair sticks. Ordered from eBay the daughter card for Bluetooth.

Seems like a new, completely different machine. Faster, smoother and NO LAG.

I'm happy now. The Plextor seems on par with my Sandisk Extreme in my desktop, and I still have the 500GB platter drive for storage.

Input anyone? Would you have just replaced the platter hdd with a ssd?

Thanks.
Click to expand...
That depends. If my Thinkpad were my only machine, then yes, the mSATA route makes a lot of sense, especially if you store a lot of media (movies, games, video, pictures, music) on your laptop.

On the other hand, I use my x220 as an ultraportable, and I don't store movies, games, videos, or pictures on my laptop; so a pure SSD experience was cheaper and simpler - I still have more than half my 160 GB of space available for whatever I need.
 
I really like the SSD/HDD combination in a laptop. Since your T530 supports msata, so much the better. My vaio doesn't have an msata port, so I ended up replacing my HDD with an SSD, moving the original HDD to the optical bay and the optical drive to a closet.

I like having the large storage capacity of a platter drive for those times I want to move a lot of files to or from another physical location without having to pack an external hard drive.
 
Thanks for reaffirming my thinking everyone. I haven't come up with a downside, except the initial cost of the mSATA drive. And I still would have had to shell out for an ssd, so the cost is a moot point. And I still have a large-ish platter drive for 'stuff'.

It seems to work and is giving me the best of both at an acceptable price.

Just have to get familiar with the T530 keyboard. It is a little different from the Txx-series.
 
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