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Thinkpad X300 With SSD Performance Evaluation
Ninjakicks writes "Hard drives are typically one of the more significant performance bottlenecks in any system today. An evaluation of Lenovo's new ultra portable Thinkpad X300 notebook shows a fast solid state hard drive can
substantially improve the performance of a system. This is especially true of a low-end, low power processor and integrated graphics, in addition to reducing overall power consumption. Despite
its 1.2GHz CPU the Thinkpad X300 is actually able to outperform some desktop
replacement notebooks equipped with dual 7200RPM hard drives in RAID 0 in productivity benchmarks, and in data transfers. Interesting results, especially considering the X300's ultra portable form factor."
microsoft introduced readyboost just in time!
The article summary gave me an interesting idea. I have an old 1.5 GHz Pentium M notebook I was going to clean up and give to my folks. I'm wondering if replacing the existing HDD with a SSD would improve performance for it. It's a little old and clunky now, obviously.
Check out the comparison on the next page. The Thinkpad got almost 3 times the battery life of the Dell, coming in at close to 4 hours.
I can't believe hard drive manufacturers aren't aware that the devices they built their businesses on are headed for the museum right next to buggy whips and engine cranks. So when are we going to see that big move to solid state storage? Less weight, less heat, less power, no moving parts...what's not to like?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
VGA needs to be there, but why haven't laptop makers embraced DVI/HDMI? I'm not upgrading my laptop until I can get an HDMI port at 1920x1080 for my 37" computer monitor at home.
Before everyone gets all worked up about the great access time (~0.1-0.3ms) and great read times, consider this...
:), or just using swap space, will show huge hits in performance.
Two issues plague SSD are write times and write wear. Just like thumbnail drives, they will "wear out" with use. Most of the newer models have wear-leveling and that reduces it greatly. But it's still an issue. Don't take the MFG's MTBF specs for face value. Then you have the huge issue with write times. Many reviews show real-world speeds of 3-4 times SLOWER then a typical 2.5" 5400 RPM HDD.
You may think that isn't much, but it can be. Things like moving files around, compiling software (Gentoo
That said, if your reasons are for battery life and/or durability, then the cost may be justified. However, at the current cost per GB ~$10-15/GB, it's just not worth it in my opinion.
ASUS C90S ran with
160GB Hard Drive @ 7,200 RPM SATA
Dell XPS M1730 ran with
2x200GB in RAID0 @ 7,200 RPM SATA - The article doesn't seem to state it but does anyone know if this is Sata 3 or 1.5?
Lenovo ThinkPad X300 ran with
64GB Hard Drive Solid-State
ASUS U6S ran with
160GB Hard Drive 5,400 RPM SATA
interestingly, the test the SSD performed best (and whuped the HDD's) was the HDD test.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
I wouldn't spend a nickel on a device of any kind if it comes from Lenovo. Where I work we almost exclusively used Thinkpads as the laptop of choice for years. They weren't the most aggressive units in terms of modern features but they were sturdy, lasted a long time and ran various OSes reasonably well.
Then Lenovo took over. The units that were assembled by Lenovo saw increased failure rates. Once the desktop/laptop business fully migrated to Lenovo we saw a significant increase in DOA units. Over the course of a 3 month period we saw a 50% DOA rate. Worse than that, in many cases these DOA units would take 6-8 weeks to turn around from a repair depot.
Needless to say, we no longer purchase Thinkpads. It's truly a shame to see a quality product go down the tubes.
Don't get me started about their tech support.
At http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=141 the Lenovo folks detail what goes in behind the scenes with the SSDs. They even detail why the (more recent) drives they use are better than the same brand (but older technology) used in the Macbook Air.
"Hard drives are typically one of the more significant performance bottlenecks in any system today."
Uh... what?
Even a "slow" 4200 rpm 2.5" drive of today has no problem reaching read speeds of over 50 mb/s. Anyone who claims a transfer speed of this order is a bottleneck for anything else than hardcore video editing is a true computer illiterate.
Its not the hardware that makes the system faster, its the OS.
Memory is cheap now right? Instead of putting 2 gig, put in 4 gig of ram and use an OS that doesn't require swap or try use all available RAM because unused RAM is a waste.
RAM is cheap, but the fuckers keep bloating shit so that swap is still necessary. CUT that SHIT out; a 15 year old Amiga has better user response than a brand new fucking system!
Why? Its not application bloat; its the fucking operating system! Windows, OS-X, Linux, they all cache the fucking universe; then they have to swap when the user, you know the asshole who actually paid for the system, decides to do something that's not cached. This is actually very frequent because not matter what algorithm you geniuses who write the OS use, its not telepathic!
Get over it and start designing system to NOT swap!
Eat that, apple fanboys. All that ... AND an ethernet port :P
They can suck my hard drive.
I did a comparison of the Thinkpad T43, Z61t, and X300 here: http://lewk.org/blog/thinkpad-benchmarks
Wear is not an issue. The available space will get smaller as some of the cells wear out, but with a drive of any serious size, this is neglegible If a 64G drive shrinks to 63Gigs after 2 years, would I care? No. And it isn't that bad.
It is true that writing speeds are a weakness for SSDs, but this is only when compared to how well they can read. Aso it is random writes, not sequential writes that are most difficult. However, the second generation drives already have faster write speeds than HDDs, so this is in no way a downside of SSD technology, but just a downside of the first generation of SSDs that don't write that fast.
That review has no actual disc benchmarks for that disc? Anyone got some? If you have a UNIXlike on one of these boxes, please run "iozone -a" and paste the results into a comment. That'll give us useful info.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
It's one thing to have that SSD there, but is there a non-SSD option? At least mechanical/magnetic drives as we know them don't have the troubles of maximum write cycles.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's a nice series, but hopefully there's a same-quality replacement for IPS in the works. Throwing more pixels on there won't do much good, but increasing the quality will.
That's part of why some of us have gone to IBM - where $3000 got actual build quality. Dropping things like IPS(with no like-quality replacement) is not a promising sign that Lenovo wants to continue in this tradition.
No thanks, but I'll be looking towards transplants of a T61p onto my T60p. The only reasons I have that is that it's an IPS model and has design fixes to the T4*p design.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I bumped into this thread, and noticed that my good buddy "AK Marc" seems to be in his prime "discussion" form here. Unfortunately as you can see there isn't much you can do about him at this point other than stop posting.
However, if your discussion with him follows the same trajectory as the one I had with him, you may find it to have some entertainment value. Indeed, he probably isn't far from calling you a nazi, which of course will be followed by denying calling you a nazi, and of course later followed by again calling you a nazi. And as if twice isn't enough, why not make the same baseless accusation a third time?
Indeed, discussions with this guy are often true gems.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Ah yes, thank you for that. Some people are just, well, a little crazy. He repetadly called me a liar despite never backing up his points ever. Oh, and apparently the laptop I'm typing this message on is imaginary.
Oh well. Some people just MUST be right.
His arguments are generally based primarily on repetition. He also repeatedly accused me of lying as well, and based that only on his own accusations of me lying.
Another of his gems was along the lines of "I'll stop calling you a liar when you stop lying". Oddly enough though, he was unable to actually demonstrate a lie.
Tragically, there have since been times when he and I have actually been in agreement on issues, yet his way of trying to discuss issues is utterly maddening.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.