W520 - various SSD issues

[ibmford]

James,

as a "Lenovo Staff" you have higher obligation than other people posting on this forum as your statements can be binding.

if it's proven that Leono is at fault in lack of compatibility in regards 3rd party disk drives, there can be a class action lawsuit brought againt Lenovo. When people buy a computer such as W520 that is marketed to "comply with certain standards" such as SATA III and it turns out there's a fault or a deliberate limitation by LENOVO that disqualifies some or all third party SATA III drives then the (LENOVO) can be held liable. If FORD motor company limited Mustang owners to use only FORD or Michelin brand tires, you can bet FORD will be sued and burned 9many consumers and other tire manufacturers would sue FORD).

I suggest you review your statements carefully with your legal department before posting a statement saying "we can't be responsible for compatibility with drives that Lenovo is not specifying it" you can't just wash your hands clean, and dump the blame on someone elses lap. 

If it turns out that the fault is on LENOVO's SATA controller, then I will see how LENOVO will escalate it to the highest level. 

Having said that the SATA III Crucial Brand M4 SSD have been working good on my W520 since applying the link power managerment(LPM) registry settings.

Recenlty NVIDIA 8600M GPU on my macbook pro burned, it was a manufacturing fault by NVIDIA but APPLE has replaced my motherboard after 3 years of use without any hassle. I command and salute APPLE for taking responsibility. They didn't try to pass the buck and they didn't try to blame it on NVIDIA. They took full responsibility for their product.

[Mark_Lenovo Administrator]

ibmford,

Glad that your drive is working well for you at the moment.  James has reviewed two issues from the forum regarding SSD 3rd party drives with our engineering team and I think his statement is appropriate.  Generally, what we are saying is that we haven't done anything to break compatibility but we can't test and guarantee that every 3rd party drive, with every version of firmware (on the drive) is always going to work without the possibility of some unforeseen quirk - I'm not sure any manufacturer could make such a claim.

What we can do, is fully support Lenovo systems and options (drives provided by Lenovo as part of the original config, so marketed and sold as valid upgrades for the system in question).   With those configurations, we can escalate and work issues through engineering as they should be proven and warranted to work.

In the case of third party devices, they generally should work, and we aren't saying that you are out of luck.   James is encouraging members to continue this discussion, and if we find that the certain drives do and do not work well on the system, then that is valuable information to others to guide purchase decisions.  If, out of the discussion, we find that there is something on our side that we could change, then we can look into that. 

I appreciate your contributions in this thread and hope you will continue to share your experiences.

Best regards,

Mark

[huberth]

Since Lenovo does not offer a SATA III Solid State Drive, I decided to get the Intel 510 based on the excellent reviews plus Intel's reputation for reliability.

Because Lenovo does offer older generation Intel SSDs, I was hoping that Lenovo would eventually offer the 510 SSD as well.

I am very happy with the Intel 510. I have two of them in RAID0 and I am getting a PCMarkVantage score of 19,000 (!!)

But: The 40 second re-boot delay is very annoying and time consuming!!

[BenG83]

When Lenovo, as an ISO certified company, advertises a product with industry standard interfaces like SATA III or, as turned up elsewhere, UEFI , the argument that 3rd party hardware is not supported can not be uphold legally, this would take the whole "standardization" concept ad absurdum. This is just a bit too easy... ISO qualitiy assurance does not required a vendor to test EVERY possible combination of hardware for compatibility, but the Intel 510 for example is hardly exotic...

[ibmford]

Crucial M4 SSD is working flawless  **knock on the wood**. It has the same (slightly more up to date) disk controller that Intel uses in 510 SSD (marvell).

With M4 there's no delay during reboot and power on finger print /reboot finger print reader with hard disk lock works without any problems.

It works just like it should, I highly recommend it.

Note: I had to disable LPM, most people with SSD end up disabling Link Power Management.

[ThorsHammer]

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Mark_Lenovo wrote:

ibmford,

Glad that your drive is working well for you at the moment.  James has reviewed two issues from the forum regarding SSD 3rd party drives with our engineering team and I think his statement is appropriate.  Generally, what we are saying is that we haven't done anything to break compatibility but we can't test and guarantee that every 3rd party drive, with every version of firmware (on the drive) is always going to work without the possibility of some unforeseen quirk - I'm not sure any manufacturer could make such a claim.

What we can do, is fully support Lenovo systems and options (drives provided by Lenovo as part of the original config, so marketed and sold as valid upgrades for the system in question).   With those configurations, we can escalate and work issues through engineering as they should be proven and warranted to work.

In the case of third party devices, they generally should work, and we aren't saying that you are out of luck.   James is encouraging members to continue this discussion, and if we find that the certain drives do and do not work well on the system, then that is valuable information to others to guide purchase decisions.  If, out of the discussion, we find that there is something on our side that we could change, then we can look into that. 

I appreciate your contributions in this thread and hope you will continue to share your experiences.

Best regards,

Mark

---

No offense Mark, but Lenovo is only selling three drives that I am aware of. It isn't like you've provided much support.  Considering the number of issues that have cropped up it would be better if you could at least indicate what drives you are working on.

For instance, a bunch of us have the Intel Series 510 SSD drives.  What are you doing about those?  Surely you are going to certify them, right?  When?

One other thing since you are a Social Media PM, please tell the Lenovo bloggers that blogging one time per month, or every other month isn't blogging.  It's marketing.

[ThorsHammer]

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JameZ wrote:
@All,

We have reviewed several cases of unexpected quirks when using generic OEM SSD devices. While OEM drives with standard interfaces may work on Lenovo products, Lenovo has established, tested, and is prepared to fully support a number of Lenovo offered SSD drives. While I would encourage us to continue to discuss experiences here and share any solutions developed in the community or that may become available from engineering in the future, we are not able to formally escalate complications with 3rd party drives as they are not officially supported.

I appreciate your understanding...

//JameZ

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JamesZ,

That isn't good enough.  Or put another way, I hope you understand when we start buying machines from your competitors. there are things we love about Lenovo and ThinkPads but you guys are really trying the patience of many people. I can assure you, if you don't improve the LCD panel quality of the 14" ThinkPad T line, and handle issues like SSD compatibility better, people will start looking elsewhere.

I know my company will.  It's already happening.

[mcheiron]

---

JameZ wrote:
@All,

We have reviewed several cases of unexpected quirks when using generic OEM SSD devices. While OEM drives with standard interfaces may work on Lenovo products, Lenovo has established, tested, and is prepared to fully support a number of Lenovo offered SSD drives. While I would encourage us to continue to discuss experiences here and share any solutions developed in the community or that may become available from engineering in the future, we are not able to formally escalate complications with 3rd party drives as they are not officially supported.

I appreciate your understanding...

//JameZ

---

@JameZ I really hope that this is not your internal approach to this problem, and you are working as hard as possible to solve it. As many of my the other board members mentioned, a "workstation" at that price has to be compatible to all standard components. This is the reason, we are choosing a Thinkpad and not a Macbook, since we chose different things than the ones you offer, e.g. an mSATA SSD that is not even in you portfolio.

It would be best for you as a company to stay in the game to fix this and other problems like it as soon as possible.

MCheiron 

[huberth]

JameZ wrote:
@All,

We have reviewed several cases of unexpected quirks when using generic OEM SSD devices. While OEM drives with standard interfaces may work on Lenovo products, Lenovo has established, tested, and is prepared to fully support a number of Lenovo offered SSD drives. While I would encourage us to continue to discuss experiences here and share any solutions developed in the community or that may become available from engineering in the future, we are not able to formally escalate complications with 3rd party drives as they are not officially supported.

I appreciate your understanding...

//JameZ

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@JameZ

I suggest that Lenovo gets on the SATA III bandwagon and test and support at least ONE SATA III (6 Mbps) drive (perhaps the Intel 510?). I do not understand why at the momeny Lenovo is not supporting ANY SATA III drives.

Installing the Intel 510 SSD has practically doubled the performance of my W520!

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[friday_phil]

1) Recently received new w520, after happy with w500 for a few years. Also bought new OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD. 2) Put new drive in, set the HDD password. w520 will never be able to access the drive again. Will not accept definite, known password. 3) Suspecting problem with OCZ drive, put it in w500. Still no access possible, even though w500 has always worked with similar Crucial C300 SDD WITH PASSWORD. 4) So put working Crucial Drive WITH PASSWORD from w500 in w520. Will not recognise password, so cannot use drive. Put same drive back in w500. Works OK. 5) Got another OWC SSD (SATA 2 drive, not SATA 3, which apparently Lenovo do not support), set password in w500, works. Put same drive in w520. Will not work. Clear password in drive using w500. w520 will then access drive OK. My testing indicates two problems with w520 BIOS evidenced by the above: 1) With more than one drive type and manufacturer, w520 BIOS will corrupt the drive if you set the password using the w520. 2) Even if you set the password correctly using another machine, and verify that works OK,put same drive in w520 and it WILL NOT accept HDD password. I and expect many others need to be able to secure HDD passwords for work. w520 is Lenovo's premium work machine. Please escalate to get this BIOS issue resolved & advise.