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."

Exceptional Battery Life

[zedlander]

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.

Re:Interesting idea for older notebooks

[jackharrer]

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.

Lenovo Hardware is Unreliable Junk

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Lenovo Hardware is Unreliable Junk

[StarHeart]

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.

Re:Interesting idea for older notebooks

[Jaime2]

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:SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there

[penguinstorm]

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:Interesting idea for older notebooks

[jackharrer]

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:SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there

[swillden]

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.

Re:Lenovo Hardware is Unreliable Junk

[amirulbahr]

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.

Re:Interesting idea for older notebooks

[jmorris42]

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.

Re:I'm curious...

[matt21811]

"(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 [mattscomputertrends.com]

Re:Lenovo Hardware is Unreliable Junk

[dunkelfalke]

thinkpads were manufactured by lenovo years before the takeover.