Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

4 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.