Upgrading Laptop with an SSD. Question about M.2 Cache Card


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Hi everyone,

I'm upgrading the 2.5" Mechanical hard drive in my Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga 14 to a Samsung EVO SSD tonight.

I understand and I'm comfortable with the process of cloning and swapping out this drive.

 

My question is about the "M.2" Cache card installed on the machine.

This "card" is 16 Gigs and is used for cache along with the current mechanical Hard drive.

 

Do I leave this M.2 cache card in place or remove it completely during the SSD upgrade?

This is my first laptop with one of these cards, but I'm assuming it also rely's on software to offload the cache from the hard drive to the card.

That said, should I be removing the software as well?

 

Thanks in advance for your input/help!

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Since cache cards are supposed to assist mechanical drive I would just pull the cache card from the machine. Check the bios and see if there is a setting for it that needs to be disabled though. If you want more storage and the system supports it, you might be able to add a larger m2 card and use it as a second drive.

 

I don't have 1st hand experience with exactly what you're doing, but so long as you clone the mechanical, swap it and the cache card for the SSD, you'll be covered. If it works you're golden, if your machine complains you can always swap back while you look for the setting that's causing the problem.

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Thanks wedev511.  That's how I'll proceed then.  Good call on the BIOS check!  I'll make sure to look there as well.

I do believe it's software called "express cache", running on the OS, that is managing the cache however.

Which makes me wonder if I should disable this software before cloning the drive.

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Well, just as a follow up, all went well.  I'll provide some detail in case someone else is doing this.

 

My first step was to uninstall "Express Cache" before cloning the disk.  (As a side note, uninstalling Express Cache slowed the computer significantly.  So, it's evident why this software is  necessary with a mechanical hard drive.)

 

I used the included Samsung Migration software to clone the SSD, which I plugged into my USB port via the cable I purchased along with the drive:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HJZJI84/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

I unplugged the Lenovo ac adapter and rebooted into the BIOS.  In the BIOS I disabled the battery (my battery is non-removable) then shut down.

(The battery is automatically re-enabled the first time the AC adapter is plugged back in)

 

After opening up the back, swapping out 2.5" the drive was easy.

 

Removing the M.2 card, not so easy.  It's held in place with one screw.  One very VERY soft screw.  Even though I was using the correct screw driver, I stripped the head.

After about 30 minutes trying to work the screw out, I gave up.

 

So I left the 16GB M.2 card in the laptop and put the case back together.

 

After booting back up, the BIOS saw the change, restarted again and booted me directly to windows.

EVERYTHING is instant and lightning quick now.  ...which I expected.

 

The 16 Card does not show up as a drive letter.  In Windows Disk Management, it's displayed, but I can't alter it.  It doesn't have a drive letter assigned to it and there are no options associated with it.

I'm wondering if I need third party software to format it....

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I did something similar with my asus s400. I had no problems getting disk manager to format the 24 gig cache drive, I use it for my downloads folder now. Maybe try using some third party partition manager software..

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Well, I got the M.2 Card formatted.  I had to download a third party software to do it.  ...now to figure out what to do with that tiny 16 gig drive.  ;-)

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Quote

 

M.2 typically can be significantly faster than sata3 sdd.  Except I'm not so sure about the small ones.

If I had a 16gb I'd benchmark it compared to the ssd.   Might want to leave it as a cache.

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I would leave the spin drive. Spin drive are much cheaper to have massive storage or buy a new one. 1tb spin drives are now available at 7200 speed.

M.2 is faster, theoretically than normal SATA3

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