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Thinkpad X300 With SSD Performance Evaluation

Posted by Zonk on from the solid-gone-man dept.

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."

15 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. -1 Troll by fred+fleenblat · · Score: 2, Insightful

    microsoft introduced readyboost just in time!

  2. I'm curious... by hyades1 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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?

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    I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
    1. Re:I'm curious... by Gat0r30y · · Score: 2, Insightful

      As soon as everyone who buys a computer is willing to put and extra 1000 dollars to get an SSD instead of an HDD.
      That or the price of flash starts dropping (right now it has been dropping linearly with density, vs. HDD's which have tended to drop price/GB exponentially).

      --
      Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
    2. Re:I'm curious... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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? Less space. Higher cost. Shorter life (though that one may have been solved and I just don't know about it.)
    3. Re:I'm curious... by hakr89 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You shouldn't be trusting your hard drive to secure erase drives either. It has its own sector swapping when it sees a sector that's hard to read, it will copy the data to a spare sector. The old sector never gets erased, and the fragment of whatever file was in that space is now where you can't delete it. If your data is that important, it should be encrypted on whatever media it's on. You can't trust a delete to truly delete every last bit. The best you can do is write random data to all sectors a few times and hope that gets through most of the wear leveling.

  3. Re:Exceptional Battery Life by What+Would+NPH+Do · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well that's kind of unfair considering the XPS line are the high end gaming laptops. The Lenova is clearly going to win considering it's not built with a bunch of high-end, and obviously more power hungry, hardware.

  4. Re:Ummm... by Koiu+Lpoi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Battery life. It absolutely smokes the other three systems, and while it is in last place, it's almost tied for 3rd. It's an impressive machine. In my opinion, though, not worth the $3258.00 price tag.

  5. SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there by linuxkrn · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Before everyone gets all worked up about the great access time (~0.1-0.3ms) and great read times, consider this...

    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 :), or just using swap space, will show huge hits in performance.

    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.

    1. Re:SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Most of the newer models have wear-leveling and that reduces it greatly. But it's still an issue. Do you have anything at all to back this up?

      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 :), or just using swap space, will show huge hits in performance. Well first of all moving a file (on the same device) is irrelevant, I assume you mean copying it. Yes SSDs have slower write speeds and that is an issue, 3-4 times slower is an exaggeration though (and the rotational speed of the drive has very little relevance to its write speed unless the drive is nearly full and heavily fragmented - which of course it isn't in any common benchmarks). Swap space is the only thing this may become an issue, but then again you're springing the extra $1k for an SSD in your laptop you've probably also paid the extra $50 for 2GB of memory, making swapping a rare event.
    2. Re:SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 4, Insightful
      But for write few, read many data warehousing tasks, SSDs are an enourmous benefit. Think about Google, where the filesystem is optimized for reading due to large files being created and read from all the time for search results (yet the files aren't constantly rewritten). Or think about Netflix needing a huge video library to serve movies over the web. The movie content isn't changing, so it would make sense to have huge libraries of SSDs that save power by not spinning, get written to once with a block of movies at a time, and get read from all the time from customer devices.

      SSDs have their place now. And they're only going to get more popular as the price comes down.

  6. Re:Exceptional Battery Life by What+Would+NPH+Do · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why do high-end laptops necessarily get less battery life? Because the higher end hardware consumes more power. The newer XPS laptops have things like dual graphics cards in them via SLI. Do you honestly think that's going to use less power than something using a lower end integrated graphics card?

    Why can't things be "turned down"? Why would you turn things down when you're buying the laptop purely for performance?

    Speedstep technology existed for a reason. Yeah, but when you're caring about performance you wouldn't be using it.
  7. Re:Exceptional Battery Life by Hemogoblin · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That's a silly comparison:

    (1) The Thinkpad is a ultraportable notepad with a 13" display
    (2) The Dell XPS 1730 has a 17" display, dual videocards, dual harddrives, and 2.5x the cpu clock speed.

    No-wonder the XPS gaming laptop had a shorter battery life.

  8. Re:Ummm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If they really wanted to show the performance improvement of SSD vs HDD, the least they could have done was run the tests using the X300 with its SSD drive replaced with a 5400 and 7200 RPM HDD even though neither is an available option.

  9. Re:Exceptional Battery Life by plumby · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've got a high end laptop that I use for development (with large amounts of background apps running on it), for photo/video editing and occasionally for playing power hungry games.

    I also sometimes want to be able to sit in the garden for a few hours and do nothing more than surf the web. As I've already got a laptop, wanting to be able to just turn the power down to get better battery life seems a more sensible option than going out and buying a separate less powerful one.

    Now, there may well be perfectly sensible technical reasons why this isn't possible but that doesn't mean that wanting to be able run a laptop at less that its full capability is in anyway silly.

  10. Re:Exceptional Battery Life by darkwhite · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Speedstep ondemand scaling does not impact performance whatsoever.

    There is no reason a hard disk drive, a memory chip, a CPU or a video card can't be designed to throttle down to minimal power levels when running idle. Just because nobody except Intel, AMD, and to some extent WD has done it yet doesn't mean it's impossible, and you bet your ass it's coming.

    Granted, a display panel can't dim itself unless it knows when people are not looking. But that's about the only thing that has an excuse not to throttle itself down.

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