T520 4239 Memory and SSD Upgrade?

[SweatyGoalz]

Hi,

So I made the leap from a macbook to a Thinkpad T520 and I very excited to receive my new machine. I found a great deal on the lenovo outlet that had everything I wanted but the memory is lacking and I also want to upgrade to an SSD and put the Harddrive that it came with in the Optibay. My questions are as follows:

What is the unofficial max memory (ram)? Ive seen most people say 16Gb, I just want to confirm.

What is the best brand that is compatible, reliable, and fast? any links or suggestions are appreciated

What is the best brand of SSD that is compatible, reliable, and fast?

Im confused by all the Sata 3/6, just tell me which one is compatible or will work best

Here is my machine configuration right now:

Thinkpad T520

4239CTR

Intel® Core™ i7 processor i7-2720QM (2.2GHz base; 3.3GHz Max Turbo, 6MB Cache)

Windows 7 Professional 64 - English

NVIDIA® Quadro® NVS 4200M and Intel® HD Graphics 3000

2GB PC3-10600 DDR3 1333MHz SDRAM SODIMM Memory

500GB, 7200RPM Serial ATA 2.5" Hard Drive

I searched the forums and found some articles that were close but nothing that fit mine exactly, sorry if im repeating any threads, im new. Thanks for any responses, Im excited to hear what everyone has to say and I appreciate you taking your time to help me out. Cant wait to get my new machine and get it in shape.

[sarbin]

Welcome to the community.

I too have seen reports of folks successfully using 16gb in t420, t520 and even x220 systems. As for brand, stick with whatever Lenovo is selling (Samsung, Hynix or Nanya - you won't know until you get it) or Crucial. I heard that other brands are hit-or-miss. I'm using Nanya sourced thru Lenovo.

Regarding SSDs, current favorites are Samsung 830, Intel 520 and Crucial M4 series drives. All are rated for SATA3. I'm currently running a Crucial M4 and am very happy with it.

Cheers.

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

Get Intel 330 180 gigs for the T520 it is very fast.

[alex1906 Support Specialist - Retired]

Hello SwearyGoalz,

Remember that with a 32 bit operating system the most ram you can have is 3gb.  A 64 bit Operating System has no limit.  The T520  has a Max RAM capacity of 8GB.  This is by the machine specs and nothing else.  The motherboard can not have more than 8gb.  But you could always take the chance and prove this wrong.

With an SSD I would go with the Crucial M4.  I have heard nothing bad about this SSD.  As stated above anything not offered by Lenovo is a hit or miss situation. 

Also, for the SSD your computer supports SATA 3.0, 2.0 and 1.0 ports.  This would be your 1.5gb, 3gb, and 6gb transfer rate.

As for the memory here is a good 4gb stick that is compatible with your system.  The other sticks compatible by Lenovo are 2gb sticks.

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/product-and-parts/detail.page?&LegacyDocID=MIGR-75003

I am unable to reach the Crucial website or I would have that posted as well.

I hope this helps,

Alex

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

64 bit OS from windows do have limit on ram depending on the OS For Home Premium Windows 7 it is 16 gigs, for enterprise, professional and ultimate edition it is in hundreds of gigs.

[SweatyGoalz]

Thanks everyone for the help! It is much appreciated. I think Im gonna go with the 16Gb of RAM so I will let you know how that goes.

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

I got 16 gigs of ram in my T420 and T520. So it should be okay to run with this amount of ram.

[SweatyGoalz]

Thought of another option:

I want to put the windows OS on an SSD so I have a fast boot time.

Should I buy an mSATA SSD or a regular SSD and place it in the optibay?

Another question is do the mSATA, Standard Harddrive Space, and the Optibay connections all support 6Gb/s?

Machine will come preloaded with windows 7 Professional on the HDD, any tips on doing a clean install on an mSATA SSD or a regular SSD?

Thanks again

[tripplec]

the more memory the bigger your swap file and hibernate files. It slows down various operations that have to deal with them. Sure you can disable the swap file and turn off hibernate if you don't want to use them. But I doubt anything is going to even use 8GB as I have now. I have thought of it but looking at used memory 8GB is certain considerably more than the OS & apps can use. Only 64bit versions of say Office, Photoshop etc will cross the 3.5GB boundry (It varies with machines but pretty damm close to that give of take a few MB but well under 4GB. More for bragging writes than anything.

[alex1906 Support Specialist - Retired]

Their is a Max for the 64bit OS as lead_org states, but it is not shown in the psref or HMM due to the idea of unsupported configurations, or "unofficial" configurations.  But officially, the the system can have 8gb. Which is not supported by a 32bit OS, but it is supported by a 64bit OS.

The higher grade OS's are what I was referring to earlier.

I hope this helps,

Alex