First time installing an SSD

I ordered a Y500 from the RFD listing, as I'm sure quite a few of us did, and I'm diasapointed with the 5400RPM HDD.

I've only used 7200RPM which I've never had any troubles with and find 5400 drives to be too slow.

I'm considering installing an SSD? From what I hear, having one would dramatically increase application load time. But where exactly do I install the SSD into? Is there an empty caddy available for expansion or will I have to remove the 1TB HD all together?

 

You could replace it completely with a regular sized SSD, or you could still keep the 1TB HDD and instead replace the 16GB caching SSD with a mSATA SSD. This way, you will install the OS and all apps on the mSATA SSD and store music, pictures, movies...etc in the slow 1TB HDD.

 

I don't think the unit I ordered includes a 16GB cache SSD. For storage, it only lists the 1TB HD.

 

Your Lenovo Y500 has two internal slots for installing storage media:
mSATA (Micro Serial ATA) slot: This is a small slot that will accept SSD (Solid State Drive) based storage.
SATA (Serial ATA) slot: You can consider this to be the "traditional" connector for installing 2.5" drives. Today, your Seagate 1TB 5400rpm hard dive is connected into the SATA slot.

Most "traditional" laptops only have one SATA slot on them (although some high-end gaming laptops have 2 SATA slots)
Most ultrabooks (super-thin laptops) will use the mSATA connector, because it allows for physically smaller storage devices.
It is very rare for a "traditional" laptop to have both an mSATA slot and a regular SATA slot. The Lenovo Y400 / Y500 is a rare beast in this regard.

For you, you have two viable options:

• Buy a Crucial M4 256GB mSATA SSD for about $210. Install that into the mSATA slot on your laptop, and put your OS / apps / games (anything with a load time). Keep your currently-installed Seagate 1TB 5400rpm 2.5" HDD for use as bulk media storage (music, videos, pr0n, etc) where load times do not matter. An MP3 or MKV video will playback equally well regardless of where it is stored, so you want to keep that space-consuming bulk media on the slowest and cheapest storage available in your system.
  
  If you go with this route, reinstall Windows 7/8 with the 2.5" 1TB drive REMOVED, and then pop that drive back in later after Windows is fully installed.
  
• Or, you can buy a 2.5 SSD in 256GB or 512GB capacity, replace your current Seagate 1TB 5400rpm 2.5" HDD, and call it a day.

Between the two, I would recommend the first option, since it gives you much more overall storage capacity for bulk media while still giving you SSD performance for the "important" things that depend on load times (OS / apps / games).

Shameless plug for my own videos. If you want to see the performance difference of an SSD vs HDD, take a look at some of the videos in my signature (especially the 3rd video (SSD boot and load 27 apps), and 4th video (SSD vs HDD boot identical drive images)).

Remember, these videos were made a little over 2 years ago (in late 2010 / early 2011) on hardware that was 3.5 years old at the time (made in 2007). And both mobile laptop hardware and SSDs have come a LONG way since then (whereas mechanical HDD storage has remained pretty stagnant), so you can expect much better performance out of your own hardware if you eventually decide to get an SSD.

 

Thanks for the detailed explanation. Really relieving I won't have to replace the 1TB