Thinkpad X300 With SSD Performance Evaluation 133
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."
-1 Troll (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm curious... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Exceptional Battery Life (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'm curious... (Score:3, Insightful)
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:I'm curious... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ummm... (Score:5, Insightful)
SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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.
Re:Exceptional Battery Life (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there (Score:4, Insightful)
You may think that isn't much, but it can be. Things like moving files around, compiling software (Gentoo
Re:Exceptional Battery Life (Score:3, Insightful)
(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.
Re:SSD Write times suck, wear issue still there (Score:5, Insightful)
SSDs have their place now. And they're only going to get more popular as the price comes down.
Re:Ummm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm curious... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Exceptional Battery Life (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Exceptional Battery Life (Score:3, Insightful)
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.