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Comment by zwayhowder | Hacker News Reader

Given it's limited to SATA3 speeds, why not just replace the internal hdd with a SATA3 SSD? My X260 is very happy with a 2tb Samsung drive. I suppose this would be lighter, but we are talking about 50g of extra weight for a 2.5" SSD.

Some of the future mods though look very cool. I particularly would like the Unifying Mod & WHQD mods.

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Is it actually limited to Sata 3 speeds? Assuming ExpressCard can at least get you a PCI Express 2.0 lane I’d expect it to be at least a couple hundred MB/s faster at least theoretically. Also I assume NVMe’s long command queue really benefits SSD performance for random access, so I suspect it may even be worth it just for the interface...

The PCIe 2.0 standard doubles the transfer rate compared with PCIe 1.0 to 5 GT/s and the per-lane throughput rises from 250 MB/s to 500 MB/s.

So it's actually less than SATA 3 speeds (600MB/s)

The intention isn't to be faster than the internal bay, it's to add another drive to machines with limited drive support. For instance, X230 only has a single SATA3 drive accessible. You can add an mSATA, but they don't come in very large capacities and the mSATA slot is limited to SATA2. This mod adds a third drive, one that goes up to 2TB at ~SATA3 speeds. So, depending on the model, it can either be a nice addition or a huge addition.

Wouldn’t you get some (minor?) battery life improvements from swapping out the spinning 2.5” with an SSD?

It's not SATA, it's NVMe.

And vintage ThinkPad enthusiasts are not typically concerned about weight unless they're going for "more is better".

its pcie 2.0, slower than sata3

500 vs 560 MB/s, but more efficient... it's a tossup IMO.

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