I'm also running a t450, albeit w/ only 16gb ram and a 500gb ssd. Fan noise is not bad, certainly not loud enough to be distracting. I purchased mine refurb through Amazon for the 6 month warranty, but didn't need to use it. Wifi works great under Debian, but I could not get the Bluetooth card to work reliably. I replaced it with a card designed for the t430, but it wasn't all that easy. I would advise just using a USB Bluetooth adapter.

The only other complaint I have is that palm rejection for the track pad is poor, I eventually disabled the track pad entirely. I prefer the track point anyway, but I know a lot of people hate using them. Keyboard is excellent, IMO better than a MacBook. I would be curious, perhaps the OP used 2 500gb SSDs, you can get drive caddys to replace the DVD drive (I kept it, as I still need to read disks relatively often).

On my T430:

    synclient TouchpadOff=1

There's supposed to be a better alternative to the Synaptics stuff, now, so I read a few months ago, but I forgot to note it and haven't actively searched it out, yet.

So they often come with 1SSD drive, then eBay the other drives or in my case, student discount Western digital is 30% off + other promo.

No fan noise