Setting up M.2 SSD as Boot Drive - T450s
There seems to be plenty of uses with no issues doing this.
I was hoping to use a M.2 SSD for my boot drive for a T450s. I followed the instructions here migrating the OS to a M.2 SSD for a T440s. This seemed to work. Only, then I had a HDD and a SSD with the OS, and HDD was still labeled 'C'.
Some applications only will install to 'C', so I thought why not change the drive label. Well, I did, and then things got cray. I had to do a reset and somehow lost my recovery partition, and then for some other not good reasons, I deleted the USB copy I had made. Anyway, recovery media is in the mail from Lenovo.
I do have the Transcend M.2, but was not experiencing the issues listed here concerning crashing during idle. Maybe I would have if I waited longer?
My question is rather than cloning the drive, can I do a fresh install of windows on the M.2 SSD once I get the recovery media? Or should I clone the HDD to the SSD and then do something else (I am not sure what) to get the boot SSD to be labeled 'C'
Posted Apr 21, 2015, 3:45 PM UTC
Thought the M.2 sleep issue you linked was gone, but now it's back. Having 12 GB of RAM probably makes it more likely to happen at random while using it, since the pagefile can sit idle and more stuff gets cached. I'm going to try straight up disabling the power saving settings for the drive now...
As for recovering your install... I don't know about the recovery media for this situation. When you use the recovery media it will probably attempt to set up the HDD + Caching setup as the default. (Putting you in the same situation as before).
What I did was install Windows on the M.2 with the MS tool to create a fresh install, then download drivers manually. You know what you're getting that way. The confusing part for my situation was that I left the boot partition on the HDD at first, so cleaning that up got complicated. You should probably reformat the HDD to make sure that doesn't happen, then use media created with this: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media
Thanks for the reply.
Yeah. After all, I do have an issue with the Transcend M.2. I sent a note to transcend support, I got this reply "We are aware of an issue regarding the MTS400 and this specific laptop model. A new firmware version to correct these issues is currently undergoing beta testing." So I am returning it and will get the MyDigital M.2 SSD instead.
Can/should you still use the 16gb M.2 as a cache drive while using the '3rd' M.2 slot- SSD as boot drive?
No it serves no purpose and is actually far slower when it writes, by 3-6x at least. (Smaller drive, less parallelism.)
I'm going to cross my fingers and hope they fix the firmware soon.
Do your function key shortcuts work?
Yeah I installed all the necessary drivers from Lenovo's site, though those should mostly work regardless.
does "disabling the power saving settings" work？ I am thinking about buying a m.2 drive. But Transcend has low power issue, and the Mydigitssd SSDs seem to fail a lot after several months (according to Amazon reviews). Thx!
Yeah, setting it to Active power mode ("AHCI Link Power Management - HIPM/DIPM" in the Advanced Power Settings) seems to have eliminated the issue for now, and hopefully the new firmware will be out soon allowing it to work regardless.
Thanks for the quick reply. I think I'll go with the transcend ssd. Using more power is better than losing data, plus I can always return it to Amazon. Hope they release a working firmware soon.
BTW, let us know if the crash comes back. Thx!