Any X200 or X200s owners using a 2-disk (SSD+HDD) setup?

Against my better judgement I'm considering grabbing an X200s from Lenovo Outlet, but I'm only interested in doing it if I can setup an SSD + HDD setup like folks are doing with 14-inch laptops (T400, Latitude E6400).

The X200s only has one 2.5" slot which is where I'd drop a 500GB hard drive for data, but I'm wondering what the best way to get a bootable SSD in the machine that I can run Windows from. Newegg sells a few ExpressCard SSDs that look like they'd do the trick, but customer reviews seemed mixed -- several folks said that they get extremely hot inside the laptop.

Can you put a mini-PCIe SSD in there if you don't get a WiMax-equipped one? Any other ways to get an SSD into the mix?

 

ExpressCard and miniPCIe SSDs aren't great solutions performance wise due to the little research and poor controllers used. Unless there is a blank 1.8" HDD space, you won't really get the benefits of a good SSD into a smaller form factor.

 

It'd be nice if they put some money into this, but since the market is so small, they probably don't care about it too much.

 

Mostly netbooks for minipci-e anyways right...?

 

Yeah, this kind of crap frustrates me. I've got a pretty specific (and evidently highly esoteric) set of desires for a laptop. I want it to be as small as possible (X200s/X200/2530p/E4200), have a backlit keyboard (E4200 only), let me use SSD+HDD (2530p only), and have a 1440x900 screen (X200s only). It's apparently a crazy idea to mash these up into one business-class laptop.

Anyway, just found jonlumpkin's thread on the issue when he was exploring it for his X200 Tablet. Sounds like it's not a good idea, and I'm going to have to get a bigger laptop.

 

I was trying to do this exact same thing a few months back ( here). While the idea is great in theory, it appears that none of the current ThinkPads support booting from the ExpressCard bay.

I ended up settling on just using a 64GB SSD (more than enough for daily usage). I then combine this with SDHC cards and 2TB+ of data on my desktop that I can access (and transfer to local storage) very quickly over 802.11N. This works well for me, and yields a very light tablet, but I will admit there are advantages to having several hundred gigabytes of local storage.

Also, note that WiMax doesn't use an extra Mini-PCI slot as it's shared with the WLAN card (Intel 5150 or 5350). However, WWAN does use a Mini-PCI slot (although I believe of a smaller size than most SSDs). Similarly, I don't believe these are bootable either.

 

Thanks for the thoughtful response. Sounds like I need to either wait for the T400s to come down in price (and deal with having a larger notebook), or wait for someone to make a machine that accomplishes what I'm looking for.

I could be waiting for awhile.

 

I don't have the laptop you guys want but I seem to remember something about external drives not being able to support Windows. Has anyone explored this with say Ubuntu (or your favorite flavor), and running Windows in a virtual machine using the express card ssd as the drive to hold the *.iso?