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Deth Muncher
2010-11-01, 02:31 AM
Okay, first, take a look at this (http://www.lenovo.com/pdf/us/en/t400_and_t500_datasheet.pdf). Go to page 2. This is my computer. Now take a look at the large port at the bottom on the side. Question 1: Is that a Solid State Disk port? Question 2: Assuming yes, do I want a SSD? Subquestion 2: Will getting a SSD make my computer run faster? Question 3: Are SSD's helpful for gaming, watching movies, etc on a computer?


More questions to come.

Gullara
2010-11-01, 02:33 AM
SSD are faster than regular drive, but they're much more expensive. If you've got some excess cash go for it.

I'm not sure if it's compatible though, not my area of expertise.

EDIT: Also you have no link.

Deth Muncher
2010-11-01, 02:42 AM
SSD are faster than regular drive, but they're much more expensive. If you've got some excess cash go for it.

I'm not sure if it's compatible though, not my area of expertise.

EDIT: Also you have no link.

Herp derp, I don't know what you're talking about.

RS14
2010-11-01, 02:46 AM
Okay, first, take a look at this (http://www.lenovo.com/pdf/us/en/t400_and_t500_datasheet.pdf). Go to page 2. This is my computer. Now take a look at the large port at the bottom on the side. Question 1: Is that a Solid State Disk port? Question 2: Assuming yes, do I want a SSD? Subquestion 2: Will getting a SSD make my computer run faster? Question 3: Are SSD's helpful for gaming, watching movies, etc on a computer?


More questions to come.

You mean on the front left side? No, that's a PCMCIA slot. The SSD would replace a regular hard-drive.

Deth Muncher
2010-11-01, 02:53 AM
You mean on the front left side? No, that's a PCMCIA slot. The SSD would replace a regular hard-drive.

O_o What on EARTH is that? To the wikipedianets...

factotum
2010-11-01, 07:43 AM
You mean on the front left side? No, that's a PCMCIA slot. The SSD would replace a regular hard-drive.

Doesn't look like PCMCIA (or PC Card, as it's now known)--far too thick for that. I agree with the second part of your comment, though--SSDs are drop-in replacements for normal hard drives, you don't get special SSD-only ports.

KuReshtin
2010-11-01, 08:50 AM
That slot is the PC Card/ExpressCard slot or PC Card/Smart Card slot (depending on model).

It would help if you posted the type and model number of the laptop (you'll find it on a label on the bottom of the machine) to see which of the two it is.

it is NOT an SSD slot, since there is no such thing on the Thinkpads.
The SSD is a type of hard drive for certain models of the Thinkpads, and you will have to fork out with a fair amount of dosh to get one, and most likely, you'll reduce the disk size quite significantly from the HDD you have installed at the moment.

The Thinkpads don't have a second slot for internal hard drives, and if you want an SSD, you would have to take the original HDD out and use it as an external drive instead, or keep switching between the two.


In my opinion: Not worth doing.

Edit: THIS HERE (http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/43y6630_04.pdf) (PDF download) is a very nice link with information about your machine.
you'll find information about what things are by looking at the 'Locations' part which starts at around page 148.

RS14
2010-11-01, 01:10 PM
Doesn't look like PCMCIA (or PC Card, as it's now known)--far too thick for that. I agree with the second part of your comment, though--SSDs are drop-in replacements for normal hard drives, you don't get special SSD-only ports.

It's a Type III slot--double thickness, and can potentially accomidate two Type II cards. (There should be two sets of rails; one may be blocked off).

Joran
2010-11-02, 05:12 AM
It's a Type III slot--double thickness, and can potentially accomidate two Type II cards. (There should be two sets of rails; one may be blocked off).

I have the exact model and that's where my CAC reader goes. It's an expansion slot.

Ditto what everyone else has said, a SSD replaces a standard hard drive. In desktop PCs, the SSD is usually one of two hard drives. The SSD, with the faster read speeds, holds the OS and other commonly used applications, while a standard hard drive, with larger storage capacity, holds media. Since you're on a laptop and it'd have to replace your current hard drive, I'd also agree: not worth it.

Here's some info on solid state drives:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-ssd-trim,2705.html

KuReshtin
2010-11-02, 06:02 AM
It's a Type III slot--double thickness, and can potentially accomidate two Type II cards. (There should be two sets of rails; one may be blocked off).

Nope, it's not blocked off.
I'm using a T400 right now, and it's got two rails, even if it doesn't look like it from the outside (I actually stuck my finger into the card slot to make sure :smallsmile:).

Jimorian
2010-11-02, 06:10 AM
The SSD, with the faster read speeds, holds the OS and other commonly used applications, while a standard hard drive, with larger storage capacity, holds media. Since you're on a laptop and it'd have to replace your current hard drive, I'd also agree: not worth it.

Although I did hear an unverified report that a computer running an overclocked quad-core CPU with an SSD array once booted Vista in under 2 minutes.

thubby
2010-11-02, 08:24 AM
ssd's are incredibly not worth it, and trying to keep the common the 2 drives separate can be a very buggy affair.

Irbis
2010-11-02, 09:32 AM
Although I did hear an unverified report that a computer running an overclocked quad-core CPU with an SSD array once booted Vista in under 2 minutes.

I think you meant two seconds there :P

My non-SSD boots in about a minute, IIRC.

To answer OP - yes, there are SSD drives you can put into PCMCIA slot, but they are generally not worth it. HDD SSDs are what it is all about.


ssd's are incredibly not worth it, and trying to keep the common the 2 drives separate can be a very buggy affair.

Hello, it's 2010 now, soon to be 2011, not 2005. They were buggy back then, now, they're a perfectly viable option. In fact, today it's the cheapest meants to noticeably speed your system in most tasks.

As for keeping 2 drives separate, my old PC had four and I did not have any problems keeping them in order, hurr durr.

Generally, if your laptop has 2 HDD bays (most of the 15'' and 17'' do naowadays) I say go for it, but only if it is modern SSD supporting TRIM operating Win7.

KuReshtin
2010-11-02, 09:36 AM
Generally, if your laptop has 2 HDD bays (most of the 15'' and 17'' do naowadays) I say go for it, but only if it is modern SSD supporting TRIM operating Win7.

As has been mentioned, the Thinkpad T400/T500 series does not have two internal HDD bays, so he'd need to swap disks around or find an external HDD adapter for the one he doesn't want installed internally in the machine to have use of both of them.

<---- Supported Thinkpads for the past 9 years at IBM.

Irbis
2010-11-02, 10:11 AM
Yup. But that's not a big problem, I could easily fit anything I use to work + few games I have installed on 40 GB, then use my old 500-640 GB drive as external - I've been doing that for a long time and that's not at all inconvenient, I'd even say carrying one external 2.5'' sure beats full keyring of pendrives :P

valadil
2010-11-02, 10:29 AM
A month ago I would have said SSDs were not worth it. Then mine showed up.

I got an OCZ Vertex 2. The 90GB model was $200. I would have gone for a smaller one, but I dual boot and wanted both OSes on the same disk.

Holy god it's fast. Win 7 and Debian each boot frighteningly quickly. Like, I don't mind rebooting between OSes because it's faster than starting an application was on my old machine.

For what it's worth though, I'm not sure I'd endorse the SSD as someone's only hard drive. They're still pretty small. If you're on a laptop and don't have room for a secondary hard drive, an SSD probably isn't worth the trouble.

Anyway, I know there are benchmarks online, but I'm working on my own. 10000 commits to a sqllite database. I'll post 'em when they're done, but the non-SSD is taking forever.

Deth Muncher
2010-11-02, 10:41 AM
A month ago I would have said SSDs were not worth it. Then mine showed up.

I got an OCZ Vertex 2. The 90GB model was $200. I would have gone for a smaller one, but I dual boot and wanted both OSes on the same disk.

Holy god it's fast. Win 7 and Debian each boot frighteningly quickly. Like, I don't mind rebooting between OSes because it's faster than starting an application was on my old machine.

For what it's worth though, I'm not sure I'd endorse the SSD as someone's only hard drive. They're still pretty small. If you're on a laptop and don't have room for a secondary hard drive, an SSD probably isn't worth the trouble.

Anyway, I know there are benchmarks online, but I'm working on my own. 10000 commits to a sqllite database. I'll post 'em when they're done, but the non-SSD is taking forever.

I gotta say, I only understood about half of that. XD

But no, I actually have a 500GB and a 1TB external, plus if I were to replace my harddrive with an SSD I'd have that as an option too (It's like 200GB, I think).

But now to what I apparently have:

So we've learned that SSD's that go into this PCblahblah port are bad news.

I MAY have two harddrives in my laptop: I recall having a backup drive, but it's gone missing since I took my laptop in to get fixed...I'll have to speak with them about that. (Used to be my D Drive.)

So what SHOULD I get for my PCetcetc port? (Yes, that's a broad question.)

valadil
2010-11-02, 10:46 AM
So what SHOULD I get for my PCetcetc port? (Yes, that's a broad question.)

Traditionally PCMCIA was used for wireless cards. But those are all built in now. The only other use I've seen for them is if you want more Firewire or USB ports. Looks like you could also get some serial ports or another Ethernet port (useful if your built in Ethernet dies). Honestly unless you really need another specific port, I'd ignore the PCMCIA slot entirely. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&Description=PCMCIA&bop=And&Pagesize=100

Deth Muncher
2010-11-02, 10:51 AM
Traditionally PCMCIA was used for wireless cards. But those are all built in now. The only other use I've seen for them is if you want more Firewire or USB ports. Looks like you could also get some serial ports or another Ethernet port (useful if your built in Ethernet dies). Honestly unless you really need another specific port, I'd ignore the PCMCIA slot entirely. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&Description=PCMCIA&bop=And&Pagesize=100

Huh. Fair enough. I COULD use some more USB ports, since this laptop has fewer than my last one (now have 3, used to have 5). All told though, my laptop has:

3 USB
1 Ethernet
1 Phone Line (for Dialup, whatever you call that port)
1 CD/DVD
1 SD
1 Firewire (I think - it's a small port labeled 1394)
1 HDMI (Out? In? I don't know.)
1 Computer -> TV

And then the PCMCIA. Is there anything I'm lacking the cabability of doing here?

valadil
2010-11-02, 10:55 AM
Huh. Fair enough. I COULD use some more USB ports, since this laptop has fewer than my last one (now have 3, used to have 5). All told though, my laptop has:

3 USB
1 Ethernet
1 Phone Line (for Dialup, whatever you call that port)
1 CD/DVD
1 SD
1 Firewire (I think - it's a small port labeled 1394)
1 HDMI (Out? In? I don't know.)
1 Computer -> TV

And then the PCMCIA. Is there anything I'm lacking the cabability of doing here?

Doesn't look like you're lacking for anything except maybe USB. The HDMI cable is most certainly out. If you have more than 3 USB devices regularly plugged in and you don't like shuffling them around or using a hub, consider adding more USB slots via a PCMCIA card. If not, I'd ignore the slot until you do have more USB devices.

The only other use I could think of for it would be a bluetooth card. Have any bluetooth devices?

KuReshtin
2010-11-02, 11:20 AM
I MAY have two harddrives in my laptop: I recall having a backup drive, but it's gone missing since I took my laptop in to get fixed...I'll have to speak with them about that. (Used to be my D Drive.)


No, you do not have two HDD internally in the laptop.
The other drives that were listed (should be Q and S) are for the recovery files of the machine. This is the diskless recovery to factory default for when you need to reinstall the entire thing. hopefully you'll never need to do that, though.

Just a tip. The physical recovery CDs for your laptop are free to get if you call your local support number and say that the recovery partition is defective and that you need to recover the system.
They should then be able to send you a set of recovery CDs that you can use when/if you need them. Always good to have around, especially if the warranty expires and your hard drive dies.


Huh. Fair enough. I COULD use some more USB ports, since this laptop has fewer than my last one (now have 3, used to have 5). All told though, my laptop has:

3 USB
1 Ethernet
1 Phone Line (for Dialup, whatever you call that port)
1 CD/DVD
1 SD
1 Firewire (I think - it's a small port labeled 1394)
1 HDMI (Out? In? I don't know.)
1 Computer -> TV

And then the PCMCIA. Is there anything I'm lacking the cabability of doing here?

The phone line port is what's usually called the modem port. RJ-11.

The 1394 port is in deed a 'Firewire' port, but since 'Firewire' is a trademarked name for Apple, manufacturers have to pay money to Apple to use the 'Firewire' name. Therefore, they just call it IEEE1394, which is the International standard name for the type of port.


I'd agree with valadil's assessment below.


Doesn't look like you're lacking for anything except maybe USB. The HDMI cable is most certainly out. If you have more than 3 USB devices regularly plugged in and you don't like shuffling them around or using a hub, consider adding more USB slots via a PCMCIA card. If not, I'd ignore the slot until you do have more USB devices.

The only other use I could think of for it would be a bluetooth card. Have any bluetooth devices?

The machine should come with a Bluetooth card installed as standard, so the only thing you should need it for would be for more USB ports.
Personally, I'd probably use a USB hub to connect stuff to instead.
Like keyboard and mouse if you're only using an external keyboard and mouse when you're working at home at your desk can be combined into one USB cable connected into your laptop instead of two.
There are also keyboards that act as USB hubs as well, that will give you more free USB ports on your laptop itself.

Right now, I'm at work and I have my mobile phone and external keyboard connected, with the external mouse connected tothe USB hub in the keyboard, so I've got a free USB port on the laptop itself.
Works fine for me.

valadil
2010-11-02, 11:20 AM
My little benchmark finished. 10000 commits to an sqllite db (with each commit being written to disk). Took 15:03 on an old disc, 9:46 on an SSD. That's significant, but not as dramatic as I'd expected.

Deth Muncher
2010-11-02, 12:56 PM
Doesn't look like you're lacking for anything except maybe USB. The HDMI cable is most certainly out. If you have more than 3 USB devices regularly plugged in and you don't like shuffling them around or using a hub, consider adding more USB slots via a PCMCIA card. If not, I'd ignore the slot until you do have more USB devices.

The only other use I could think of for it would be a bluetooth card. Have any bluetooth devices?

I actually have a Bluetooth card, and my printer SAYS it's wireless/Bluetooth capable, but damned if I can figure out how to make it do so.

Regularly, I have 3 things that need to be plugged in to USB: two externals and a mouse. However, I also find myself needing places for an iPod to be docked, my printer, possibly a gaming controller. So either I go for a hub, or get the adapter, it seems.

factotum
2010-11-02, 02:48 PM
My little benchmark finished. 10000 commits to an sqllite db (with each commit being written to disk). Took 15:03 on an old disc, 9:46 on an SSD. That's significant, but not as dramatic as I'd expected.

It kind of depends what data you were committing. The actual read and write speed of SSD is not much greater than for a conventional spinning hard disk--in fact, SSDs can actually be *slower* for writing because of the way the non-volatile memory they're made of works. The area where SSDs really excel is in seek times, which are practically non-existent for obvious reasons; that being said, if you were to run a test where you *read* lots of little bits of random data from all over your SQLITE database, I would expect that to be a lot faster on SSD than conventional drive.

valadil
2010-11-02, 07:03 PM
It kind of depends what data you were committing. The actual read and write speed of SSD is not much greater than for a conventional spinning hard disk--in fact, SSDs can actually be *slower* for writing because of the way the non-volatile memory they're made of works. The area where SSDs really excel is in seek times, which are practically non-existent for obvious reasons; that being said, if you were to run a test where you *read* lots of little bits of random data from all over your SQLITE database, I would expect that to be a lot faster on SSD than conventional drive.

Hmm, good to know. That would be a lot of reads though, as sqllite is crazy fast on any disk.

I'd also like to throw out that SSDs are limited by currented OSes. I was reading up on some of the issues linux was having in using SSDs. Basically there are some unoptimized kernel level code that assumes you can only seek ~500 times a second. On an SSD, seeks can happen something like 10000 times a second. So yeah, there's a bit of speeding up that can be done there. I don't actually if Windows has similar limitations, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Deth Muncher
2010-11-02, 08:40 PM
Hmm, good to know. That would be a lot of reads though, as sqllite is crazy fast on any disk.

I'd also like to throw out that SSDs are limited by currented OSes. I was reading up on some of the issues linux was having in using SSDs. Basically there are some unoptimized kernel level code that assumes you can only seek ~500 times a second. On an SSD, seeks can happen something like 10000 times a second. So yeah, there's a bit of speeding up that can be done there. I don't actually if Windows has similar limitations, but it wouldn't surprise me.

I don't know much about this, but I do know a friend of mine who's a hardcore computer guy went and switched over to Windows 7 Super Mega Fancy Edition, and it boots in something like 7 seconds, if that helps. It probably doesn't.

Jimorian
2010-11-02, 10:43 PM
I think you meant two seconds there :P

My non-SSD boots in about a minute, IIRC.


I kid Vista, but basically I've had good experience with it. :smalltongue:

If one's computer boots very slowly, the best first thing to do is tell all those installed programs that insist on booting at startup, just so they can phone home and check for an update, to sit down and shut up.

Deth Muncher
2010-11-02, 10:47 PM
I kid Vista, but basically I've had good experience with it. :smalltongue:

If one's computer boots very slowly, the best first thing to do is tell all those installed programs that insist on booting at startup, just so they can phone home and check for an update, to sit down and shut up.

THIS! HOW THIS YOU DO? I've been trying to figure out how to tell everything that I only want it to start up when I tell it to (excepting, of course, anti-virus and the like) but am computarded.

EDIT: Also, I was under the impression that SATA and SSD were the same. Are they? If not, does this PCMCIA port handle SATA things? (Questions I have from browsing Newegg.)

factotum
2010-11-03, 02:35 AM
If you want to fiddle around with what launches on startup your best bet is the MSCONFIG utility that's been bundled with Windows since XP. It has a "Startup" tab that lists everything that launches on startup on your machine, and allows you to disable those items.

SATA and SSD are different things. SATA is the name of the interface that goes between the computer and the drive and allows them to talk to each other--it neither knows nor cares if the drive it's talking to is an SSD or a conventional spinning unit. Most modern machines will use SATA as opposed to the old IDE standard (the one that used the big ribbon cables, if you've ever seen inside an older machine).

PCMCIA (or PC Card, as I keep saying it's now called) is another type of interface. It might well be possible to get a SATA (or, more likely, e-SATA) adapter that plugs into a PC card port, but I'm not sure why you'd want to...

Jimorian
2010-11-03, 08:06 PM
THIS! HOW THIS YOU DO? I've been trying to figure out how to tell everything that I only want it to start up when I tell it to (excepting, of course, anti-virus and the like) but am computarded.

As factotum says, this is under the MSCONFIG application with windows. To get to it, go to START, All Programs, Accessories folder, then click "Run". In the little box that pops up, just type "msconfig" (without quotes) and hit Enter.

Under the Startup tab are all the programs that boot up when you turn on your computer. Sometimes, it's easy to tell what they are, sometimes not. The quickest way is to just Google each one you aren't familiar with. The weird names are sometimes drivers for hardware, so you don't want to just automatically uncheck anything you don't recognize.

Hit Apply, reboot, and if you unchecked something you shouldn't have, you will usually get a dialog box that tells you the computer really needs it. Just turn it back on in that case.

But a lot of programs these days either want to load in to be able to automatically check for updates, or to "be ready" in case you launch them later. I believe both MS Office and OpenOffice are culprits of the latter practice for example, while Adobe Acrobat Reader is guilty of the first.