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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."

36 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Ummm... by What+Would+NPH+Do · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. Sure it's data transfer performance was impressive but in all but 1 of the performance benchmarks it was last place.
    1. Re:Ummm... by What+Would+NPH+Do · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Though I guess I should add that even when it was in last place, the number it's pushing are rather impressive.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    4. Re:Ummm... by Concerned+Onlooker · · Score: 5, Funny

      "the number it's pushing are rather impressive"

      Not nearly as impressive as being modded +5 Interesting and then being modded +4 Interesting for a reply to your own post that basically negates it.

      --
      http://www.rootstrikers.org/
  2. -1 Troll by fred+fleenblat · · Score: 2, Insightful

    microsoft introduced readyboost just in time!

  3. Interesting idea for older notebooks by mcsqueak · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Interesting idea for older notebooks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      A few people are doing this (with some straining) to the old Versa Litepad tablets. At 1 kg, these things are remarkably light for a device with a 1024x768 touch screen (gotta use those Wacom pens though), and can be found for $400 used now. The 1.8" HD in them is a total dog, but swapping them for a 1.8" SDD apparently makes a huge difference.

    2. Re:Interesting idea for older notebooks by jackharrer · · Score: 4, Informative

      I did it with my Media Centre PC. Old Compaq Presario 900. I bought dirt cheap CompactFlash to IDE 44 converter and put it instead of HDD. Mythbuntu start in half of the time, even that throughput of CF is almost the same as HDD. Best of all that SSD cost me £15 for 4GB. Straight from eBay.

      Do it, it works brilliant.

      --

      "an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
    3. Re:Interesting idea for older notebooks by Jaime2 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I did the same with my MythTV front end. I bought an adapter and a cheap 8GB CF from newegg. Mine boots reasonably fast (about the same as my other front end with an old 120GB drive), but it took about 20 hours to install Fedora Core 8 and run a software update. Every once in a while it freezes on live TV playback, and I think it is some sort of delay writing to the flash drive. My other front end has no such problems. The one with the CF has better specs than the one with the hard drive - much faster processor, more memory, better video card.

    4. Re:Interesting idea for older notebooks by jackharrer · · Score: 3, Informative

      Interesting. I had no such problems. My Mythbuntu install went nice and smooth. I haven't tested it really well as I'm doing some contract away from home. But my wife hasn't mentioned any problems.

      Oh, my one is Frontend and Backend on one machine + Samba shares on server mapped to folders through fstab. Also added noatime to fstab and got rid of swap whatsoever, just to save space on CF.

      --

      "an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
    5. Re:Interesting idea for older notebooks by jmorris42 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Not a problem. Buy the addionics dual CF to laptop hdd adapter for a few bucks, add in a pair of 32GB CF cards and you should be able to get it all delivered for just a few dollars over the $300 mark. Either take them as is and have a pair of volumes or do a LVM or RAID0 and make one 64GB volume.

      Now if you want a shiny SATA drive, those are in major demand and carry a premium. So be smart and think outside the box and you can win.

      --
      Democrat delenda est
    6. Re:Interesting idea for older notebooks by flyingfsck · · Score: 2, Interesting

      For less than the cost of a SSD, you can give your parents a new Asus Eee PC which has a SSD. The advantage of the Eee PC, is that you will have ZERO support issues. It just works and just keeps right on working.

      --
      Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
  4. Exceptional Battery Life by zedlander · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. 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.

    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:Exceptional Battery Life by qbwiz · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This is true to an extent, but there are trade-offs that can't be made when using the computer. You may be able to turn off sections of a chip, but not nearly with the level of detail that you can by not adding transistors at the beginning. Trying to convert a fast, out-of-order CPU with many pipeline stages into a slower, in-order CPU with fewer pipeline stages at runtime would be effectively impossible. Additionally, the way that the chips are manufactured affects their speed: for example, fast transistors generally have higher leakage currents, so you have to compromise between high clock speeds and low static power.

      --
      Ewige Blumenkraft.
    4. 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.

    5. Re:Exceptional Battery Life by Shadow-isoHunt · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I just wanna point out that if you're looking for battery life, modern laptops are not where it's at. I've got an old dell latitude c610, 1.2ghz pentium 3, 1gb of pc133, ATI Radeon mobility m6. Using both bays with 66whr batteries, I get about 13 hours of battery life. I've never actually managed to run it down with the LCD closed.

      Yes, it'll run linux, it actually dual boots.

      --
      www.isoHunt.com
    6. 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.

    7. 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.

      --

      [an error occurred while processing this directive]
  5. 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.
  6. 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.)
  7. Re:I'm curious... by What+Would+NPH+Do · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The issue with the lifetime related to the maximum number of writes has been one of the issues constantly addressed. With the newer SSDs, I've heard ratings of around 20 year lifetime with average usage.

  8. 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.

    3. Re:SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there by penguinstorm · · Score: 3, Informative

      Just like thumbnail drives, they will "wear out" with use. My understanding is that the technology being used in "SSD-Hard Drives" is quite a bit different than the tech being used in the average cheap thumb drive such as my 4GB one.

      By the same token, the tech being used in the iPod Touch is quite a bit different, which is how it can offer 32GB of flash storage for ~CDN$500 while a 64GB SSD upgrade for a MacBook Air is CDN$1,400.

      So if you can back your statements up with some evidence, knock yourself out. Otherwise...I think the issue isn't nearly as real as you seem to suggest it is.
      --
      Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
    4. Re:SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there by bjourne · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Not true, write speed isn't all that important. The reason why hard disk drives are such huge bottle necks is because reading data is a synchronous operation. When you read a file, you do so because you need to do something with its data. Right now, not some time in the future. So your program has to wait (block) until the hard disk has finished reading all data. Depending on how far the disk head has to seek, the wait may take a huge amount of time.

      To put it in perspective: when the CPU accesses a register, it is like one neuron talking to another in your bran, to fetch something from cache memory is like asking someone on the other side of the room, memory access would be asking your neighbour. Disk seek would be walking from London to ask someone in Istanbul.

      Writes on the other hand, are much less expensive because they can be performed asynchronously. There is no reason for your program to block and wait until the hard disk has written all data, there is no urgency at all involved. The data is written to a cache in memory which the kernel periodically unloads to the disk controllers cache which in turn writes it. Writes are kind of like asking your next door neighbour to book a freight plane because you have some important goods that needs to be shipped to Turkey soon.

      --
      Football Odds
    5. Re:SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there by swillden · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      No, it isn't. Partly because of increases in the number of write cycles they can support, but mostly because of size increases and wear leveling.

      Consider a 64GB device with a write cycle limit of 100,000. Assuming constant rewriting of all of the data, you'd have to write 6.4 petabytes of data to wear it out. Assuming you could deliver sustained writes at 22 MB/s (150x), it would take 6,400,000,000 / 22 = 290,909,090 seconds, which is over nine years of continuous, max data rate writing.

      In practice, you don't rewrite all of the data on the card, much of it (OS and apps) is relatively static. Still under normal use a card with, say, 4 GB of free space will last for years -- easily as long as a hard drive would have.

      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.

      Reviews of what cards? They come in different speeds, you know. The 150x 8GB card that I have for my DSLR absolutely lives up to the billed speed. At three 8MB images per second, keeping up with the camera requires a write throughput of 24 MB per second. The rated max speed of the card is 22.5 MB per second, and the results are exactly what you'd expect -- it very nearly keeps up with the camera. I'm going to get a 200x card and I expect to be able to shoot RAW continuous at 3 fps until the card is full. Until I get a new camera that has a couple more megapixels and shoots at 5 fps.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
  9. Re:Lenovo Hardware is Unreliable Junk by StarHeart · · Score: 5, Informative

    My office uses Thinkpads exclusively. I would say maybe the failure has gone up some since Lenovo took over, but depot times have always been fast. I just turned in a hard drive RMA today, and I will probably have it with advanced replacement by Monday.

    They also seem to be having sales all the time these days. Which means prices have come down.

    --
    Havoc Penington, the bane of my Linux desktop.
  10. Re:Lenovo Hardware is Unreliable Junk by treeves · · Score: 2, Funny

    I have a Thinkpad T43 that had to have its main board replaced. I sent it out, they got it the next day, replaced the board and sent it back the same day, so I was without it for only about 48hours. I kinda wished it hadn't had that three year warranty, though. Then I could've gotten a new one instead of just fixing it.

    --
    ...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
  11. 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.

  12. Re:Lenovo Hardware is Unreliable Junk by amirulbahr · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is FUD. I can see why you posted as AC.

    AFAIK Lenovo bought IBM PC Division in its entirety. In other words the ThinkPads are still being made by the same entity.

    In our experience, maybe things have changed in terms of design choices on the newer models, but the service level and DOA rate has not changed all that much at all. In some territories support is still being outsourced by Lenovo to IBM.

  13. Re:I'm curious... by matt21811 · · Score: 2, Informative

    "(right now it has been dropping linearly with density, vs. HDD's which have tended to drop price/GB exponentially)."

    Well thats not right.
    Flash prices/GB have been dropping dropping dramatically faster than disk for the last five years.
    I've sudied it.

    http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashdiskcomparo.html

  14. Re:Lenovo Hardware is Unreliable Junk by dunkelfalke · · Score: 2, Informative

    thinkpads were manufactured by lenovo years before the takeover.

    --
    "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap