SSD in T60p - user experience

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freakwave · #1 Post by **freakwave** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 9:06 am

Hi all,

finally I got one of those hyped SSD drives for my T60p.
(Samsung 32GB MCAQE32G5APP)
I was very exited because I use my 2nd Harddrive for development purpose (vmware, eclipse, oracle jboss).
Initially I thought this will give me a huge performance increase because of the access time which is < 1ms.

So after doing some tests I am a bit disappointed because the performance increase is not as I wished.

My experience is really more from a day to day usage. I did not do any benchmarks because you can find them on the internet.

Here are at least some numbers from my stopwatch, by comparing the same setup on the SSD with a 7K100 ibm drive:

Starting eclipse
7K100: 11s
SSD: 7s

Loading about 9000 objects into eclipse memory:
7K100: 1:45m
SSD: 1:20m

Executing about 500 XSLT transformations and executing 500 sql scripts against oracle:
7K100: 2:18m
SSD: 2:25m

restarting jboss:
7K100: 1:18m
SSD: 1:13m

So as you see, it is a bit mixed.
It is really interesting that the low access time does not give that much of an improvement, even though thousands of files are read in the test above. I can only guess that the cache/high seq. transfer in the 7K100 combination does an awesome job.

But if we think about that this is more or less the first generation SSD which is targeted for mass production, it is pretty impressive.
Wait one more year, and hard drives have only one advantage: space.

Regards,

Wolfgang

axiom · #2 Post by **axiom** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 9:11 am

so now you don't need APS

sugo · #3 Post by **sugo** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 9:15 am

I wonder how the power consumption compares.

It looks like the SATA version is still not yet available.

freakwave · #4 Post by **freakwave** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 5:15 pm

The power consumption is about 1/4 of the 7K100.
Idle is 0.1 and active is about 0.5 Watt.

One more thing in regards to performance. The system feels kind of strange. The windows startup and application load is really much faster than the 7K100, but then you have always these very short delays while working, e.g. scrolling in the file explorer, writing text in editors ...
I can only assume that the missing hard drive cache is the issue here.

In the meanwhile I am not quite sure if I will continue using the SSD or if it goes to ebay.

#5 Post by **gator** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 5:47 pm

Great post. Good to see some numbers with real day-to-day apps than some synthetic benchmarks. Were you able to actually measure a faster boot time for windows, or you just felt it was booting faster?

And the important questions: how much did it cost you? what was your opinion about heat and more importantly, HDD noise? Was there any noise at all?

nxman · #6 Post by **nxman** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 6:18 pm

Thanks freakwave very informative topic.

CarrerCrytharis · #7 Post by **CarrerCrytharis** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 6:33 pm

freakwave wrote:The power consumption is about 1/4 of the 7K100.
Idle is 0.1 and active is about 0.5 Watt.

Could somebody tell me, in rough terms, what proportion of total power consumption this accounts for? What kind of impact would it have on battery life?

axiom · #8 Post by **axiom** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:01 pm

CarrerCrytharis wrote:
freakwave wrote:The power consumption is about 1/4 of the 7K100.
Idle is 0.1 and active is about 0.5 Watt.
Could somebody tell me, in rough terms, what proportion of total power consumption this accounts for? What kind of impact would it have on battery life?

1/50?
impact is slim

The big power eaters are CPU and LCD

CarrerCrytharis · #9 Post by **CarrerCrytharis** » Tue Apr 10, 2007 8:26 pm

axiom wrote:
CarrerCrytharis wrote: Could somebody tell me, in rough terms, what proportion of total power consumption this accounts for? What kind of impact would it have on battery life?
1/50?
impact is slim

The big power eaters are CPU and LCD

Thanks a lot. The reason I ask is that I was considering getting a hybrid drive for my machine once they come out.

cchsiao · #10 Post by **cchsiao** » Wed Apr 11, 2007 1:08 am

There are also something else available nowadays. Check the following link: http://www.dvnation.com/nand-flash-ssd.html. Note that Transcend has SSD in the form of ExpressCard. I am not sure if Thinkpads can boot from ExpressCard devices, but even not, one can still use READY BOOST (is this the correct terminology?) to improve the battery time and the preformance (probably). As somebody already mentioned, the most power eating devices are CPU and LCD, so I doubt if one can really increase the battery time using ExpressCard solution, since ExpressCard also eats some power.

By the way, since I have a X41t, I am always waiting for a 32GB 1.8" IDE SSD in order to improve the performance. Can freakwave tell us how much you get your SSD, and probably also where?

freakwave · #11 Post by **freakwave** » Wed Apr 11, 2007 2:05 am

Hi all,

I will try to get some windows startup comparison over the weekend. A first guess would say that the windows 2003 server in vmware starts about 30% quicker.

I bought the ssd from overclockers for about 300 Pound:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprod ... =HD-043-SA

If you are in the US you can get it cheaper from newegg (488 USD), but I think it is out of stock:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820147015

kulivontot · #12 Post by **kulivontot** » Wed Apr 11, 2007 3:59 am

Hard disk in general makes up around 3-10% of total power consumption at the very most... Check out this article for a break down of power consumption in a thinkpad R40. The biggest players as previously mentioned are the CPU, LCD, LCD backlight, and the graphics card. Don't expect to double your battery life by switching to SSD.

claudeo · #13 Post by **claudeo** » Wed Apr 11, 2007 8:03 am

Specs say read latency is <1ms. It would seem that write latency is much worse. But how much worse?
In any case, interesting first impressions. Thanks for sharing.[/b]

cchsiao · #14 Post by **cchsiao** » Wed Apr 11, 2007 12:54 pm

To me it looks like the model freakwave use is an IDE one, not a SATA one. How do you connect an IDE HDD to you T60p? I am just a bit curious about it. Probably you use some converter and a 15" T60p is big enough to handle that converter.

Oh... I think of one way of doing it. Are you connecting through the old version of ultrabay slim 2nd HDD adapter?

brentpresley · #15 Post by **brentpresley** » Wed Apr 11, 2007 8:56 pm

Guys, this is JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG.

All the major SSD manufacturers have announced substantial speed increases (3X or so) over the course of the next year for sustained data transfer rates (access times will remain VERY low). Couple that with the inclusion of SATA2 into laptops and we are in for a real TREAT in terms of performance in the next few years.

Ragtopgeek · #16 Post by **Ragtopgeek** » Wed Apr 11, 2007 9:10 pm

brentpresley wrote:Guys, this is JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG.
... Couple that with the inclusion of SATA2 into laptops and we are in for a real TREAT in terms of performance in the next few years.

Does this mean our current SATA could be used (perhaps via some "retrofit" or bios update), or are you implying SATA2 would have to be built into the new yet-to-be-released notebooks?

Thanks, R.

killigrew · #17 Post by **killigrew** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 2:02 am

The T60 already has SATA2

cu

brentpresley · #18 Post by **brentpresley** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 6:02 am

killigrew wrote:The T60 already has SATA2

cu

Got a link to back that up b/c I was under the impression that Intel's southbridge on laptops was a SATA1 controller.

killigrew · #19 Post by **killigrew** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 12:36 pm

Sry, don't have a link, but mine supports NCQ with my new Samsung Drive and that's a SATA2 only feature

cu

dsalyers · #20 Post by **dsalyers** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 9:38 pm

According to Intel Hardware specification for the ICH7 (page 46) the ICH7 implements the SATA I(1.0a) specification and some optional features from the SATA II specification. So, current Intel chipset (945) only fully supports SATA I, not SATA II.

killigrew · #21 Post by **killigrew** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 2:22 am

oh, ok, sry, but wich Features are not Supported?

cu

dsalyers · #22 Post by **dsalyers** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 7:03 am

killigrew wrote:oh, ok, sry, but wich Features are not Supported?

cu

NCQ - Supported
Auto Activate DMA - Supported
Hotplug Support - Supported
Asynchronous Signal Recovery - Supported
3 Gb/s transfer rate - Desktop ICH7 Only
ATAPI Asynchronous Notification - Supported
Host Initiated Power Management - Mobile Only
Command Completion Coalescing - N/A
Port Multiplier - N/A
External SATA - N/A

Any other features are not supported.

SSD in T60p - user experience

SSD in T60p - user experience

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