[Discussion] Why the hell does this Thinkpad have a 16GB M.2 drive?

[Chronified]

 

I do some light refurb work as a side hustle and was in the process of wrapping up this T440 when I opened Taskmanager and noticed there was a second drive.
Noticing it's 16GB I start scratching my head, looking around the laptop checking for an SD card left in a slot perhaps. 

 

Started digging deeper and found the model number... leads to an M.2 Sata drive??
Opened it up, low and behold there it was. A 16GB M.2 Sata SSD ... but why??
 

Repasted since it was literally 4 more scres and dug some more.

Thinkpad claims these were included to increase "HDD performance up to 4 times" and it "Provides SSD performance while avoiding higher power consumption typically associated with SATA performance"

 

But...

The T440 were part of their premium business line, they came with a 128GB SSD standard on the base model, WHICH THIS SYSTEM STILL HAS. 

 

This 16GB drive, has likely been sitting in this unit since production, has sat completely unutilized and unallocated in the 8 years this PC was produced.

Don't get me wrong, I love thinkpad, both their support and their premium products... but why

 

I'm keeping up hope that this was to open the gate to odd corporate deployments that'd use a Linux distro that fits that 16GB and userfiles are kept on the SSD, or perhaps it's to used as a scratch drive, or Pagefile space (it has 8GB of ram) but other than that there's no real explanation.

 

Would love to open this up to discussion because I am 100% lost.

[BionicSeaSerpent]

4 minutes ago, Chronified said:

 

I do some light refurb work as a side hustle and was in the process of wrapping up this T440 when I opened Taskmanager and noticed there was a second drive.
Noticing it's 16GB I start scratching my head, looking around the laptop checking for an SD card left in a slot perhaps. 

 

Started digging deeper and found the model number... leads to an M.2 Sata drive??
Opened it up, low and behold there it was. A 16GB M.2 Sata SSD ... but why??
 

Repasted since it was literally 4 more scres and dug some more.

Thinkpad claims these were included to increase "HDD performance up to 4 times" and it "Provides SSD performance while avoiding higher power consumption typically associated with SATA performance"

 

But...

The T440 were part of their premium business line, they came with a 128GB SSD standard on the base model, WHICH THIS SYSTEM STILL HAS. 

 

This 16GB drive, has likely been sitting in this unit since production, has sat completely unutilized and unallocated in the 8 years this PC was produced.

Don't get me wrong, I love thinkpad, both their support and their premium products... but why

 

I'm keeping up hope that this was to open the gate to odd corporate deployments that'd use a Linux distro that fits that 16GB and userfiles are kept on the SSD, or perhaps it's to used as a scratch drive, or Pagefile space (it has 8GB of ram) but other than that there's no real explanation.

 

Would love to open this up to discussion because I am 100% lost.

definitely sounds like it could of been some sort of Scratch or Boot drive for less bloated OSes i know practically nothing about ThinkPads but i do personally find these tiny capacity SSDs rather interesting

[Needfuldoer]

Given the small size, I wonder if it was supposed to be a 'hybrid drive' situation, where it's a high speed buffer for a spinning drive? If that laptop was CTO, someone might have just ticked the box to get the "speed enhancing" SSD even though they got a full boot SSD.

 

Or maybe Lenovo was stuck with a mountain of nearly useless SSDs they had to use up.

[Tegneren]

This seems like a cashing solution which might be beneficial especially for HDDs, and from what i can see the T440 has variants with HDD in them.

 

The link you provided also has a link for a cashing driver, try installing it if its not already.

I dont know if the volume has to be allocated for it to work, 

 

Try to run a crystal disk mark to see if the ssd performs better than natively.

[SlashedM]

I would definitely think this was used for caching like how, similar to what essentially SSHD and Fusion Drives are (though those are one complete unit iirc). 

[DigitalGoat]

Agree with the caching theory, it seems like a poor mans or even pre curser to Intel's Optane acceleration setup, using ultra low latency 16 and 32GB 3DXpoint modules to speed up spinner HDDs. The drives if initialised as standard drives are perfectly fine for really small Linux distros and should work as normal SSDs/ NVMEs, although at a lower bus speed, generally x2 for NVMEs.

[An0maly_76]

Just pointing out here, that is an mSATA, not an M.2, technically. That definitely would NOT fit the M.2 slots on either of my systems.

[RollyShed]

This link shows how to strip it down and mentions the 16GB card.
https://www.myfixguide.com/manual/lenovo-thinkpad-t440-teardown/

The 5th picture down is the battery. But it is mounted internally and has already been unplugged... hasn't it? It did say, first picture "Unlock and remove the battery." Does that mean two batteries?

Odd.

The 10th and 11th pictures, show the 16GB card.

[Chronified]

54 minutes ago, RollyShed said:

This link shows how to strip it down and mentions the 16GB card.
https://www.myfixguide.com/manual/lenovo-thinkpad-t440-teardown/

The 5th picture down is the battery. But it is mounted internally and has already been unplugged... hasn't it? It did say, first picture "Unlock and remove the battery." Does that mean two batteries?

Odd.

The 10th and 11th pictures, show the 16GB card.

Woah wait hold the phone, it does have an external battery. I'm holding the laptop now. 
I went and pulled the battery while it was powered on and........ it stayed on???

I did a repaste yesterday, took a photo of the process and TOTALLY MISSED THE 2ND BATTERY

I should honestly take this laptop to the bar and say "I bet I can turn this laptop on, unplugged with the battery removed" , 2nd battery doesn't show up in Windows.

 

[Chronified]

1 hour ago, DigitalGoat said:

 pre curser to Intel's Optane acceleration setup

That's exactly what it was, I tried to install the program in the mentioned link and it worked

They put an ExpressCache capable drive on a computer that already has an SSD, accelerating programs even further.

[RollyShed]

So why build it with two batteries? And why a 16GB bit of storage? And why.....?

 

I presume that 16GB could be replaced with something useful so you'd have the equivalent of two disks? Another maybe 250GB short M.2 two notch card?