[ltp] Buying a New Thinkpad

[Robert Tomsick]

On Wed, 2011-05-04 at 09:29 -0700, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Wed, 4 May 2011 12:24:23 +0200
> Adrian Bastholm <adrian@javaguru.org> dijo:
> 
> >Since I've just bought the low-end T520 I thought I could add some
> >value to the discussion.
> >mSATA instead of WWAN:
> >True, but there's no need to remove the WWAN card (and thus unscrew a
> >lot of pieces) since there's an ExpressCard slot at the right hand
> >corner, which takes SSD drives. 
> 
> Do I understand correctly that you can add an expresscard SSD drive and
> use it as the boot drive, leaving the original spinning drive in place
> to use for storage? This might be the best way to go. I could, for
> example, put Fedora or Ubuntu, and ~/ home on the SSD drive, and mount
> the spinner in a folder in ~/. The expresscard SSD drive wouldn't have
> to be more than 32 GB or so.

Yes, you can use an ExpressCard SSD.  You could also use an mSATA SSD,
as these may be cheaper and/or faster.  Both will allow you to retain
the original drive.

> Another option is a Seagate Momentus which is a hybrid. Evidently it
> contains internal software that uses the SSD portion for files that you
> are using a lot, and the spinning portion for everything else,
> allocating the usage dynamically. It's an intriguing concept, but with
> the Momentus the SSD portion is only 4 GB. 
> 
> As a second question, is there data anywhere on real-world read/write
> speeds of the various SSD drives currently available. Technical specs
> are fine, but I'd also like to see customer reviews. 

Anandtech is my go-to source for SSD info.

-Rob