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Sata SSD or msata SSD


Rik Pierlo

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I don't know why you guys think of the mSATA as a big factor, maybe because you want to keep the 1TB hard drive? What I did is: took out the 1TB drive; replaced it with 256GB Samsung PRO 840Series; left the 16GB SSD intact, and using the 1TB as an external hard drive.

Many of us would like to have an SSD while still keeping the 1TB HDD for mass storage. For example, just my games library is several hundred GB's and it would not be very cost-effective to purchase an SSD large enough to hold it all plus the OS and other applications.

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Too bad mSATA devices still are so hard to get by through the normal retail channels.

I don't understand? Did you mean meatspace retail channels? It is inconsequential to order a mSata SSD from any number of online retailers and have it almost immediately.

The Plextor M5M seems to perform similar to the Samsung 840, but a bit slower than the Samsung 840 Pro.

The SSD is a vast vast improvement over the caching drive or the HDD alone, and benchmarking the drive doesn't matter in most real life situations where the SSD is so much faster than the HDD that you're not really going to notice if your SSD is slightly slower than a different one.

I've got Windows 7 and some games with heavy loading (Skyrim, Morrowind) on my 240gb Mushkin SSD and using my 1TB drive for media and most of my other games. The Ultrabay is in use for SLI and DVD-rom config. It's fantastic, I love this machine and how versatile it is.

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I never understood either why people put so much faith in synthetic benchmarks to gauge how good an SSD is. In my opinion reliability, consistency, ease of use, and price/GB are more important than numbers on a piece of paper or website. I doubt anyone can really tell a big difference in speed between different drives

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I never understood either why people put so much faith in synthetic benchmarks to gauge how good an SSD is. In my opinion reliability, consistency, ease of use, and price/GB are more important than numbers on a piece of paper or website. I doubt anyone can really tell a big difference in speed between different drives

Quantifiable differences are easier to understand for most people. That being said, I agree with you.

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You definitely want the mSata for the y500. There are no drawbacks compared to a regular form factor ssd. I have the plextor 128gb M5M with the stock 1gb HDD and it runs like a charm. Hardest part is reinstalling the OS onto the SSD (you can't use the recovery to do this, you have to obtain a disc, easy to do from a torrent site).

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I am using currently a mSATA LITEON 256G (Dell ALienware OEM) drive as my boot disk on my Alienware 18, and even tough I'd rather have chose another mSATA brand myself (Intel or Samsung), I am quite happy with it so far;

I have also a more traditional 2"5 Samsung 840 pro 256G SSD installed, and for day to day use, there are no visible differences with the mSATA. Sure, if you run several benchmarks against the two drives, the Samsung will probably get better results, but SSD is much faster than mechanical drives anyway;

Another reason why I choose mSATA is flexibility of usage for remaining 2"5 bays within your laptop.

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I am currently using the Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB SSD. Had to use a 2.5" drive since there are not much m2 SSDs on the market (have the y510p no SLI). For more storage space I replaced my DVD drive with the 1TB HDD and HDD caddy. The bezel was easily removed so it doesn't affect the appearance.

Despite the Samsung 840 EVO series uses TLC memory (theoretically less durable) a torture test of a computer hardware site convinced me: Hardware.Info tests lifespan of Samsung SSD 840 250GB TLC SSD [updated with final conclusion] - Final update (20-6-2013) | Hardware.Info United Kingdom. They tested two Samsung 840 250 GB SSDs. After 707 and 745 written TBs the first reallocated sectors appeared. The first uncorrectable errors appeared after 764 and 768 TB.

After two weeks of intensive use I'm still at 0.7 TB of written data on the SSD. Which means that my SSD will die after about 38 years. I guess that my laptop won't survive that long:p

Don't know how this test reflects other SSDs with TLC memory but I think the new drives are pretty durable which makes it easier when choosing a new SSD.

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  • 2 weeks later...
I'll pick SATA. Simply because I'll probably use the drive in other laptop / PC. My Lenovo uses M.2 for it's alternative SSD slot, and I doubt it will be available widely / easily in other platforms.....

And since the y510p only has space for a 42 mm long m.2 card, only a cache m.2 card fits.. The actual SSD's are (for now) a few mms (87 mm?) longer.

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  • 2 years later...
On 8/13/2013 at 10:14 AM, quasimodem said:

i have a y500 without any ssd and just added a mushkin msata from newegg. only problem is my bios sometimes doesn't detect it.

QM

I bought one there too. Did you try the update http://www.poweredbymushkin.com/index.php/support/ssd-firmware-updates.html ? I haven't installed mine yet but may get their Flux enclosure and buy a bigger one.

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This picture might be valuable, for those who need some information about the Y500 SATA-controller:

 

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/20669i3ED20FAB23355295/image-size/original?v=mpbl-1&px=-1

 

You'll note that the connected drives are only connected with SATA 2 speeds, but the controller is indeed SATA 3.

 

Also, if you look in the Intel Rapid Storage interface, the mSATA port also support SATA 3.

Edited by ShamblerDK
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