# mSATA SSD required for laptop.



## Vap0rX (Jul 15, 2012)

I am looking to bump up my Lenovo's Y470 laptop's speed which is bottle necked by its 750GB HDD @ 5400rpm. Loading time is turning me nuts. I searched and found out that i can hook up an SSD which has mSATA connector. Well i am totally confused with all the SSD terminologies. Can't a normal SSD work with my system? Whats the difference between the normal SSD and mSATA SSD's? I need a system drive of 60-120GB which can boost my system performance.
Running Windows 7 on core i7 2670QM, 8GB RAM, AMD 7670 1GB.


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## lindy (Jul 15, 2012)

Here's some info on SATA... Click Here


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## Vap0rX (Jul 16, 2012)

Thank you for the information regarding the "SATA" connectors. So now which drive is best?


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## lindy (Jul 16, 2012)

"Best" can be a lot of things... Price, speed, capacity, ect. Obviously you're going to have to shop for one that will fit your connector, and fit in the physical space in your laptop. What type of connection does your mechanical HDD use? I'll hazard a guess and say it's a regular SATA connection with the mSATA slot being for an additional drive. In which case you could get a small mSATA drive and use it as a boot drive, and have your mechanical HDD for mass storage. Or you could straight out replace your existing HDD with a hybrid drive like the Seagate Momentus XT which has a 8Gb SSD built into it as a cache drive. Slower than a pure SSD, but faster than a regular HDD. Or lastly you could replace your mechanical HDD with an SSD, capacity being dependent on the size of your wallet.


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## Jetster (Jul 16, 2012)

Replacing your HDD with a SSD would be best. An msata is a smaller SSD that plugs into a small mini PCIe like slot that accepts a SSD to act as a cache for commonly used programs to assist load times for the platter drive. It would also help but when you power down it erases so start up are the same


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## theeldest (Jul 16, 2012)

Jetster said:


> It would also help but when you power down it erases so start up are the same



This part is wrong. As it is a standard ssd it will retain data between boots. If it's Intel's SRT cache it works incredibly well.


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## Jetster (Jul 16, 2012)

theeldest said:


> This part is wrong. As it is a standard ssd it will retain data between boots. If it's Intel's SRT cache it works incredibly well.



Didn't know that I must have read it wrong. Thanks


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## Vap0rX (Jul 17, 2012)

I need 60 or 120 gigs keeping the budget in mind of $150. At least this will boost the performance i need which is bottle necked by my current HDD @ 5400 rpm.


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## lindy (Jul 17, 2012)

I use a 60Gb. SSD as a boot drive and it's more than enough for that purpose. NewEgg.com has some mSATA drives that ought to fill the bill with regards to your budget.


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## sandiegoborn32 (Aug 25, 2012)

I'm just wondering...can you plug in an mSata SSD in any mini PCIe slot on a laptop motherboard? My ASUS G72GX has two I belive...One is already being occupied by the Wifi card. I want to know if I can plug in an mSata SSD into the other. Thanks!


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