Lenovo Thinkpad T430s for Data Wrangling

[Kallan Gerard]

I'm a camera assistant, working mostly with Alexa, F3 and the occasional Epic/Scarlett. I've got an old 2009 Windows Laptop which has expresscard 34 and esata but only one USB 3 port. And not much of a battery life.



I'm looking to upgrade to something better, but Apple hasn't ever really released something that attracts me, and it doesn't look like they ever will.



I've done a lot of research, and it looks like the Lenovo Thinkpad T430s with i7 is the only laptop in the world with Express Card 34, 2 x USB 3, and Thunderbolt! It also has the capability for multiple hotswap batteries, second hard drive, upgradeable ram (atleast 16GB) and much cheaper dock options.



With this laptop, I could load SxS cards to two USB 3 hard drives with no power supplies, dongles or docks necessary (Assuming the drives are bus powered). I could also insert a 6Gbps eSATA expresscard adapter to load redmags for RED work. With a Sonnet Thunderbolt Expresscard adapter it would give me two expresscard slots, and future expandability for whatever TB solutions come out (as long as they are daisy chainable).



I'm just worried about how well the industry supports windows based data loading. Also there's no silverstack for windows, and I'd have to use Mac Drive for most productions.



Does anyone have any thoughts on this, I'd like to make a move on a new laptop relatively soon.

 

[Ben Graham]

Lenovo products are kick ass. Apple hardware is dated and their workstations are useless. For small shows a laptop is fine but for a larger show or anything using codex an on set workstation is best.

 

[Kallan Gerard]

What are your experiences with using Mac Drive and Alexa/Red Data Manager.

I've found Alexa (I hate spelling it Al3xa even though I know that's what it's called) Data Manager to be average at best on Windows.

I sort of feel I have to go OSX/Mac simply because that's what the software developers support.

I don't think Codex is ever used in my area. Most productions are relatively small, most of them use Lacie Rugged drives as their main rushes drives.