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Thinkpad X300 With SSD Performance Evaluation

Posted by Zonk on Thu Apr 17, 2008 04:11 PM
from the solid-gone-man dept.
Portables Hardware Technology
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."
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Submission: Thinkpad X300 With SSD Performance Evaluation by Ninjakicks (1100143)
[+] Mobile: Lenovo Intros the Monstrous ThinkPad W700 275 comments
Engadget recently got their hands on an early delivery of Lenovo's new powerhouse of a laptop, the W700. Aimed at graphic artists and photographers, this beast is designed to really pack a punch. No word on how much for the extra fusion generator to power it for longer than 20 minutes. "Containing enough computational artillery to level a small village, this for-creatives-only behemoth is designed for sheer pixel pushing ... and little else. The system packs in two features aimed at graphic artists and photographers which are fairly unique to a laptop: a built in Wacom digitizer just to the right of the trackpad, and an on-board color calibrator. But what's happening under the hood you ask? Well, for starters the 17-incher sports the first-ever Intel Quad Core Extreme CPU in a laptop (no word on speeds at this point) as well as the first showing of NVIDIA's Quadro FX 3700 graphics chipset (with a hefty 1GB of memory on-board). The workstation also serves up dual hard drive bays configurable as RAID 0 or 1 (SSD or traditional disk, naturally), up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and an optional Blu-ray burner. Of course, that's fully kitted out -- the W700 starts at $2,978 and moves skyward from there."
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  • Ummm... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by What Would NPH Do (1274934) on Thursday April 17 2008, @04:15PM (#23110942)

    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.

    • Re:Ummm... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by What Would NPH Do (1274934) on Thursday April 17 2008, @04:20PM (#23111004)
      Though I guess I should add that even when it was in last place, the number it's pushing are rather impressive.

    • Re:Ummm... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Koiu Lpoi (632570) <koiulpoi@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Thursday April 17 2008, @04:37PM (#23111208)
      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.

  • -1 Troll (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fred fleenblat (463628) on Thursday April 17 2008, @04:20PM (#23111014) Homepage
    microsoft introduced readyboost just in time!

  • Interesting idea for older notebooks (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mcsqueak (1043736) on Thursday April 17 2008, @04:21PM (#23111020)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.

    • Re:Interesting idea for older notebooks (Score:5, Informative)

      by jackharrer (972403) on Thursday April 17 2008, @04:44PM (#23111298)
      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.

      • Re:Interesting idea for older notebooks (Score:4, Informative)

        by Jaime2 (824950) on Thursday April 17 2008, @05:34PM (#23111814)
        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.

        • Re:Interesting idea for older notebooks (Score:4, Informative)

          by jackharrer (972403) on Thursday April 17 2008, @05:47PM (#23111954)
          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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by flyingfsck (986395)
      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by jmorris42 (1458) *
        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.

  • Exceptional Battery Life (Score:5, Informative)

    by zedlander (1271502) on Thursday April 17 2008, @04:26PM (#23111090) Homepage
    Check out the comparison on the next page [hothardware.com]. The Thinkpad got almost 3 times the battery life of the Dell, coming in at close to 4 hours.
    • 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.

        • Re:Exceptional Battery Life (Score:4, Insightful)

          by What Would NPH Do (1274934) on Thursday April 17 2008, @04:45PM (#23111300)

          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.
          • I've seen some pretty spiffy laptops which came with both integrated graphics and higher-end 3d cards. There was a switch to select between them, and apparently you gained about an hour's worth of battery life (performing the same tasks) if you switched off the 3d card.

            I wish more laptop makers would follow suit, but I'd imagine that support concerns would prevent that, if not the relatively low market share for such hybrid devices.
            • AMD (Hybrid Graphics) and NVIDIA (HybridPower) have been working on this, and AMD has already released chipsets that can do it. It's taken a long time for this to happen because few people would want to reboot their computer to switch graphics cards, and switching graphics cards on the fly can be relatively difficult.
              • That's why I mentioned the small market share.

                I'd like one laptop that I can use while out and about, but which I can also use for gaming if the mood strikes me. For gaming, I'd almost certainly plug it in, as I can't imagine that it's got a good enough battery life to sustain itself for very long.

                Anyway, they've really revamped the XPS line. They have a 13" XPS notebook that doesn't look suited for gaming at all, and a 15" that looks like it might passably play games from 2 years ago. They've moved thei

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by darkwhite (139802)
            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
            • Processor speed, at a very basic, can usually be ramped back. This is part of what happens when you choose "longer battery life" on a PowerBook...

              Yes, I still call them PowerBooks.

                • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                  by plumby (179557)
                  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 s
              • Then why would you be buying a high performance laptop if you weren't going to use it all? That sounds like a rather daft thing to do, don't you think?

                No, I don't think so. Most "desktop replacements" are laptops with high end hardware. They are used 90% of the time plugged into the wall. However, when on a plane ride, you either have to carry batteries greater than the weight of the already heavy laptop, or deal with the fact that a desktop replacement will probably not be able to finish a single movi
              • Perhaps, but wouldn't it be great if laptops could have both high performance and long battery life, even if it couldn't have both at the same time? Sometimes I want to play games, and sometimes I want to use my computer for a long time a long distance from a power jack. It would be great if I could have one computer that does both well. It's obviously not possible to do that perfectly, but your belief (that one should care only about either performance or battery life, and not both) is not helpful.

        • Re:Exceptional Battery Life (Score:5, Interesting)

          by qbwiz (87077) * <johnNO@SPAMbaumanfamily.com> on Thursday April 17 2008, @04:48PM (#23111338) Homepage
          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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Hemogoblin (982564)
      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.
    • 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.
        • Yeah, the LCD's smaller, but it's also got a res of 1400x1050 so it's not too painful to use. You can even play CS if you'd like. No source, though.
  • 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?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Gat0r30y (957941)
      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).

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.)
      • 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.
        • I wouldn't believe hard-drive maker's specs. "Average usage" is probably booting the machine and checking your e-mail in their minds.
        • This is longer than hard drives last, so I'd say that issue is "solved" at least in the current context of solving it. It can still, of course, be improved.

          I'm sure someone's going to claim to have had a hard drive running for 20+ years...blurg.
      • I don't have doc to back it up, but as far as Ive read, with the write balancing features of SSDs, they can last a sick amount of time before the amount of rewrites finish them off. Also, they have one big big big advantage over HDDs: you know in advance that they are going to fail, quite reliably. So sure, it MAY (not all that true depending on usage anymore) fail faster than an HDD, but it won't fail by surprise on a saturday morning.
  • 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 H

    • Re:SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2008, @04:52PM (#23111380)

      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.

    • Re:SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TooMuchToDo (882796) on Thursday April 17 2008, @05:02PM (#23111474)
      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.

    • Re:SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there (Score:4, Informative)

      by penguinstorm (575341) on Thursday April 17 2008, @05:41PM (#23111896) Homepage

      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bjourne (1034822)

      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 registe

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by swillden (191260)

      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

  • 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.
    • Problem is most of the time a standard laptop you already own get's a kick in the pants by upgrading the HDD.

      My old and incredibly outdated 1.8ghz iBook G4 feels snappy cince I upgraded the stock drive to a 7200rpm 120 gig drive. It gave it a new lease on life (along with upgrading to 2 gigs of ram) to the point that Tiger is very useable and I dont have to buy a new laptop for another 2-3 years again.

      Honestly, a 64gig hard drive is kind of useless today for a "desktop replacement" laptop.
  • At http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=141 [lenovoblogs.com] 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.

    • Re:Lenovo Hardware is Unreliable Junk (Score:5, Informative)

      by StarHeart (27290) * on Thursday April 17 2008, @05:29PM (#23111758)
      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.
    • 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.

    • Re:Lenovo Hardware is Unreliable Junk (Score:5, Informative)

      by amirulbahr (1216502) on Thursday April 17 2008, @07:03PM (#23112518)

      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.

    • Some have. Apple notably.

      My Sony Vaio SZ670 has DVI on the docking station and can push 1920x1080.

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