As mentioned in my last post, the ThinkPad T420 is getting some nice upgrades. The first upgrade was the storage.I purchased the ThinkPad T420 back in the summer of 2016 as a refurbished unit. My assumption is that the machine was probably an off-lease machine; rather, a machine that was “leased” to a company for a couple years before being replaced by newer units.
To keep the cost low, the T420 was originally shipped with a 140 GB hard drive, which was considerably small but actually has lasted much longer than I originally anticipated. The drive it came with was a HGST (Hitachi) TravelStar drive.
The new drive is a HGST TravelStar as well. While I was going to drop a 1 TB drive into this computer so that I would never have to worry about it again, I thought about a couple things before clicking the “Checkout” button:
- how much longer will the ThinkPad T420 be used?
- how much storage will I really use?
To answer the first question, the T420 will be used at least another year. I’m hoping to make it stretch as long as possible before I have to upgrade due to the hardware becoming outdated, or because of the computer not meeting the “high” expectations of my educational institution. (Which are actually lax compared to other universities.)
The second question: in this age of cloud and “SaaS” (software-as-a-service) programs like Microsoft Office 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud, the requirements for on-board storage is going back down. (Which is actually nice, especially since your data can be accessed anywhere and you don’t have to worry about loosing that important document thanks to accidents and hardware wear-and-tear.)
Answering both questions, I came to the conclusion to purchase a 500 GB TravelStar which has a speed of 7800 RPM, as compared to the 1TB which was priced similarly but had a 5200 RPM speed. I think the increased storage will last as long as the computer will (at least, until it is retired.)