This is my basic hardware / software setup for the current software development machine at present.
It’s not the latest available, however the Thinkpad is functional and fast as usual including a perfect working finger print reader (AuthenTec AES2550/AES2810) used to login into the Gnome Display Manager (gdm).
I have replaced the optical DVD drive inside of the Ultrabay by a classical magnetic hard disk: 320 GB Western Digital, Scorpio Black, running at 7200rpm, spinned down using hdparm -Y /dev/sd* most of the time.
I love the silence of the ssd drive because it is much better to listen – for example to this: Johannes Brahms wrote it for Clara Schumann. This music is very German 😉