Lenovo P71 - Adding a Second M.2 Drive

[dargo72]

I recently purchased a Lenovo P71 and it has been great so far. I ordered it with the 512gb M.2 drive and it is very peppy. I decided to add a second M.2 drive and ordered the following:

SAMSUNG 960 PRO M.2 512GB NVMe PCI-Express 3.0 x4 Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-V6P512BW

My original intent was to clone the original M.2 drive to the new one and then use the new Samsung Pro as my boot drive. I was then going to use the original M.2 drive for backup purposes. Here are my questions.

1. Is the original M.2 drive NVMe? I was unable to figure this out.

2. Will the new Samsung Pro be noticeably faster?

3. If I decided to run both drives in a RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration, would the original M.2 "hold back" the Samsung Pro?

4. Anything else I am missing?

Thank you,

 

[photonboy]

Companies can and do substitute similar drives.

You would really need to do a BENCHMARK to determine the performance of your drive.

1. No way to know without looking at the drive or using software to report its name.

2. No way to know due to #1, however in the REAL WORLD it's very, very challenging to see obvious benefits over an existing fast SSD drive. Typically you'd need something like VIDEO EDITING and even then only if the previous SSD was the choke point.

3. Yes most likely (but again only where the SSD was the choke point and not the CPU, GPU, system memory, internet or other bottleneck)
RAID1 - same data on both drives so should operate in read/write at slowest drive performance
RAID0 - data split across both drives so should operate (up to) 2x the performance of the slowest drive

RAID0 is not recommended as it's not only less reliable but again there may be no scenarios you do that would benefit.

4. No?
Except perhaps that you should make a backup to an external drive using a tool like Acronis True Image. You can use a USB drive (Acronis TI has an option to detect things so if you periodically plug in an assigned drive it will backup if it's past due).

Alternatively you can get a WDMYCLOUD (ethernet to router) to work with Acronis TI. You only have to type the password (for router?) in once to setup then you can do something like:
- weekly
- differential
- auto delete all but latest chain

 

[dargo72]

Thank you for the reply.

Yes, I currently use Acronis and will be backing everything up before beginning the process. I currently have an external RAID 5 setup and backup my home computer and this laptop regularly. I also back up really important files to the cloud via Acronis.

I was able to pull up info on the existing drive. It appears it is NVMe. The model is this one:

Samsung SM961 512GB (NVMe) SM961 MZVKW512HMJP-00000 MZ-VKW5120 Gen3 M.2 80mm PCIe 3.0 x4 512G SSD

The specs from Newegg on this appear to be pretty close to the 960 Pro.

Now the new 960 Pro uses NVMe 1.2........ I am unsure if this matters or not.

Now understanding that this is sort of a vanity project, I just need to decide if I want to go RAID 0 (as if the performance will be almost double that of the Samsung SM961) or just go with my original plan of using the 960 Pro as my primary drive and the existing Samsung as a backup drive.

As a side note, I also purchased heat sinks for both and will be placing them on during the install.

Regards.

 

[photonboy]

RAID0 is more likely to cause issues than it is to give any noticeable performance boost in the REAL WORLD (not benchmarks).