Thinkpads Forum

Ok, I have successfully cloned and installed Intel X25-M SSD on my T60. Running smoothly so far without any problem whatsoever. I'm booting to Vista at half the time compared to my previous Mechanical HDD. It's fast and highly recommended for those looking for the ultimate performance in a notebook harddrive.


Benchmark Below HDTune(Slow Server Please Be Patient!)
http://www.mmu.co.id/intelssd.jpg


mod edit: embedded photos are limited to <50k per forum rules.   image converted to link.

Very nice.

How is your battery performance with the SSD?

Temetka wrote:Very nice.

How is your battery performance with the SSD?

My Apology, I just received my SSD today, therefore I didn't have a chance to test the battery life just yet. I'm using 9-Cell battery for my Thinkpad.

Also what is the best way to measure the battery life? when I clicked on Power Manager: Remaining Battery: 4hr 30min @ 98%

--
exactly 1hr usage browsing internet down to 70%. thinkpad default power management.

May I ask where did you buy your Intel SSD? and for how much?

Thanks

http://shopper.cnet.com/hard-drives/int ... lst#stores

I personally bought from this store in California:
http://www.unistorage.com/unistorage/in ... rt=2962815

I meant that do you see your battery lasting longer than it did with the old hard drive?

I also have a new 9-cell for my T60 and I am regularly getting 5+ hours of standard usage out of it. I was wondering if that run time is increased due to the SSD taking less power.

So far I personally didn't really notice any improvement with the battery life. :/ I only noticed the dramatic performance improvement on day to day activity.

CAVEATS:
I experienced freezes in the past few days with Intel SSD on my system. It didn't happen often but when it happens it's surely annoying.

In my case, when I was typing out my email using Outlook 2007 with Internet Explorer 7 on. My computer would all a sudden froze with an hour glass on the screen. Nothing operable except for the mouse. OMG at first you would freak out because you thought you would lose your email you just typed. The harddrive light indicator was also flashing brightly heavily. You wouldn't be able to do anything anymore with your computer for about 5 minutes and finally everything would return back to normal.

It's very annoying though. Currently, I already turned off prefetch and superfetch features within Vista as being recommended on
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum ... hp?t=43525

I hope this problem resolves. Surely there is a problem with Outlook 2007 and SSD because I have seen my Outlook 2007 crashed(Non responding) few times in a day because when I re-opened my outlook, it would warn me that outlook was not closed properly and it would then undergo Data file check in progress with lower right corner little gear symbols.

Other than that, I haven't encountered any other problems(Finger crossed). Doing IM conversation has also been flawlessly. No stuttering no lagging. I thought I would post this experience since Anandtech review praised so highly the Intel SSD for not exhibiting any problems similar to generic SSDs.

I also got one. But it only have 105 MB/s while it reachs 200 MB/s on my desktop.

http://forum.tt-hardware.com/fichiers/u ... 213957.png


http://forum.tt-hardware.com/fichiers/u ... 821464.png

I also have the same SSD, and I did a mirror image from my Hitachi 7k2 drive.

It has been running awesome, and nothing in terms of crashing has happened.

Just to see how much of a difference I would see, I installed Vista x64, and the entire Office 2007 Suite (Enterprise Edition). Office 2007 Enterprise (this version has every last Office app in it) installed in a little over two minutes.

Boot-up and shutdown times are also greatly improved. I'm loving it, and it's certainly a keeper.

You guys experienced no freezing problem with the outlook?
I disabled both prefetch and superprefetch. So far Still freezes. This time it happened when I was working with the Opera browser, I also have Internet Explorer 7 and Outlook 2007 open, and I was downloading a file from the background at 15KB/sec, and my system froze again for a full 6 minutes.


Not sure if this website might be relevant for you guys.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum ... hp?t=44484

"Are you running a computer that has a Solid State Drive (SSD)?
If you are running Outlook 2007 on a computer that has a solid state drive (SSD), you may experience frequent pauses when you perform typical operations in Outlook. The Outlook product team is aware of this issue and is investigating solutions for a future release.

If your computer is running on a computer that has both an SSD and a non-SSD (rotational) hard disk, you can reduce the frequency of the pauses by moving the .ost file or the .pst files to the non-SSD drive. For more information about how to move your Outlook Data Files, see the following article, "Introduction to Outlook data files," on the Office Online Web site: :
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlo ... 99831033#2 (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlo ... 99831033#2)
"

What drive me mad is that T61p seems to only wotk in SATA 1.5Gb/s. I was cheching all the benchmark I have every run with HDD, the T61p never goes over 120 MB/s in burst mode and now, the Intel SSD only tops at 105 MB/s. The same drive reach 200 MB/s in my desktop.

Do you know if T400 would bring the transfer speed to 200MB/sec?

From Behardware.com:
"And what is there to say about the Intel solution? A real treat on paper, the Intel X25-M literally knocked us for six during the first tests! However, the dip in performances recorded when the SSD is submitted to varying workloads is quite worrying, even though Intel says this phenomenon is to be “expected”. It is one thing for performance to dip and it may be acceptable as long as their starting point is so far ahead of the SSDs of its competitors. The problem is that in certain cases, which are, it’s true, very specific, performance is recorded as being lower than that of a 5400 rpm disc, particularly during file copying. It would be great news if Intel could find a solution allowing it to retain high performances whatever the workload of the SSD, even if this means losing something from maximum performance.

For now only Samsung is really managing this. Whether on PC Mark Vantage, file copying or IOMeter, performances do not disappoint, without, it is true, attaining the levels of the Intel X25-M when at its best. There is a price for all this unfortunately, with the Samsung SLC (or its exact OCZ copy) coming in at €800 for 64 GB. The icing on the cake is that it is the most economical of all the SSDs tested."

So it seems to be true that all Thinkpads SATA ports are limited to 1,5GB/s? This is a huge letdown.

Can anybody confirm that this limit also applies for the X301/X200/T400 etc.?

I have formatted this afternoon, and now installing every single thing one by one.

So far it performs faster than before. I have been doing software installation through CDROM, Transfering data from one USB drive to this drive, Downloading windows update, Chatting msn, Posting notebookreview.com, essentially all the multitasking you can think off without any freezes. That's a progress with a formatting pain. A pain but I guess it's worth the pain as long as the problem completely solved.

For others who are using intel SSD and no freezing problem, do you guys still have prefetch, superfetch, and indexing on? I'm just wondering. At the moment I will leave only the indexing on, since I'm really hoping I could use this drive with indexing. it's very helpful with outlook.

Presently, it's a lot more responsive and snappier, therefore I will leave the prefetch and superfetch off. Thanks for everyone taking their time replying to my posts. I really appreciate this.

I will come back in a week touting about Intel SSD and my happiness. Hopefully my dream is realized!

I don´t really think that with a fast drive like yours you will ever need to turn them on Although being one of the most emphasized features introduced with Vista superfetch and prefetch remain quite useless in my opinion...

Enjoy your new drive

Marin

Part of the NT philosophy has always been to keep the RAM memory full, with anything that might be needed, so there will be no delay IF it is needed.

That's been implemented in different ways in NT4/5/5XP and Vista but the fetch technologies in Vista simply extend what was done previously. This is part of the "extra stuff" that arguably is bloatware. or makes Vista fater--depending on how well it works for you. Supposedly the SuperFetch will monitor apps that are loaded in and out of memory, and alter the contents to the SuperFetch scratch area to match what the individual applications have been using. So if you close a major app, Superfetch should flush everything it is using--if it needs the space for the next app. Or, it might actually hold that entire closed app, still in RAM, in case you re-open it.

Regardless of drive speed this should make some operations faster, especially on computers with gobs of RAM running major apps and large files.

If all you run is MSOffice and some email--it's probably way overkill compared to what the processes are designed for, and disabling them might actually speed things up.

Now if they'd just pay equal attention to plugging memory leaks and crash vulnerability. (sigh)

Thanks for the clarification, hellosailor! Just going slightly off topic: In order to completely disable the fetch functionality in Vista it is not enough to just disable the corresponding services, but there are also a few reg tweaks needed. The heaviest apps to launch that I had on my ThinkPad installed under Vista were Matlab 7.6 and 3dsMax 2008. I have never observed any launch time difference with both prefect/superfetch enabled and disabled (and I have run long enough my system with prefetch functionality fully enabled to give Vista the opportunity to understand my working habbits). This observation of mine refers both to cold launch (first launch after reboot) as well as to repeated launch after reboot. The first has always been same slow, the latter has always been same fast. What is more, I could track the well known after-boot HD activity of Vista back to the prefetch/superfetch features. Opposed to many opinions out there, it is actually not the indexing service that causes such high HD activity after the boot process has completed, but the superfetch/prefetch feature. However, I don´t have any observations regarding computers running Vista with less than 2 GB of system memory.

hellosailor wrote: Now if they'd just pay equal attention to plugging memory leaks and crash vulnerability. (sigh)

As for Vista I wouldn´t count on that. I hope this is going to be improved in Windows 7, which brings me to the point that I don´t think I´ll ever again come back to Vista, I can wait for Windows 7 (although I don´t really believe that it will be such an improvement over Vista...)

Sorry for going off topic

Marin

Marin-
IIRC, with NT5 MS made big news because the "prefetch" memory page size size and drive cluster size were matched in 64K segments so that applications could be stored and loaded faster--with page-by-page stores and loads without anything being resized. And, they earned & caught hell because it only worked with some MS apps, because they'd conveniently forgotten to tell other vendors how to exploit the technology. Or, if you believe MS, because all those other sloppy programmers just hadn't bothered optimizing their apps for NT. (Hmmm, sounds like we've heard proof of that often enough before?!)
So once you are into the realm of using uncommon apps--as you apparently are--who is to say if the apps have been optimized for the latest NT tweaks, or not?

As to Windows7...All I know is that folks seem to forget that the next complete rewrite of NT will be "NT7", not "Windows7". All that MS has really said about the successor to Vista has been preliminary talk--which frequently does not reflect real product--involving modular code and dropping 16-but support in favor of a true 64-bit OS with a 32-bit "thunker" to run the old 32-bit apps. (Thunker being MS's own term for the part of Win9x that ran 16-bit code in the 32-bit environment.)

I'd be REALLY SHOCKED if the next version of NT was NT7 rather than NT6.2 or 6.5. Right now, there's a 64-bit version of NT6, which is Vista64. For MS to do a total rewrite on core code and stick a whole new version number on it, would be an outright admission they'd screwed the pooch, bigtime. The modular business is supposed to allow for running the OS on "light" machines, like the eeePC, without having to write all new code--but they've been talking about that since NT4, and still haven't gotten it to work right, much less replace the main OS.

I still don't get it. According to T60 specifications, it is supposed to support:
Storage controller type
Serial ATA/IDE

Storage Controller / Serial ATA Interface
"Serial ATA-300"

Doesn't this mean it should support intel SSD all the way without being capped at all? how about 110MB/sec?
What's going on?

Update on SSD:
I just disabled prefetch and superfetch as I was actually experiencing stuttering which eventually lead to a total system freeze no matter how long I waited. Finally, I had to do a force shutdown. Actually I was fortunate enough for being able to replicate this problem twice at least it’s not random like the last time.

This happened when I had an excel opened, a word opened, outlook opened(Trying to reply email), Opera browser opened with many tabs, Foobar Player was opened doing song names inserting wirelessly from another computer.

Basically, I started to notice my mouse stuttering when I switched from one application to the next. During that time, I also experienced stuttering when moving from one email to the next especially those which contain HTML linked graphics. In the end, after a minute of stutters joy, it transformed into a complete freeze.
Problem seems solved by disabling prefetch and superfetch, haven’t seen any lagging or stuttering yet with similar amount of work being done. I guess when I was doing so much work at the same time, it was overkill for Intel X25-M.

For those of you lucky enough to have an X25-M, I'm interested in buying one (based largely on the AnandTech review), but my employer requires a HD password. I had a Patriot SSD (yes, having all the lovely studder problems that typical "cheap" MLC drives do), but one of its additional downfalls was the lack of HD password support; I could try to set one in BIOS, but it would never "take."

Can someone who has an X25-M try setting a HD P/W via ThinkPad BIOS and then let us know if it worked?

I already tried to turn on the Password feature for the Harddrive with my T60 BIOS and it worked. So no problem there on my system.

Dan, does your require a computer password to access the hd--which means the hd can still be removed and accessed from another computer--or do they require a password and on-board encyrption IN the hard drive, the way that Hitachi and others actually bulk encrypt the data on the drive itself, so the drive cannot be read even if it is moved to another computer?

That's a harder feature to find, you might need to check with the SSD vendor if that's what you need.

Just for clarification, there is a power-on BIOS password and then there is a HD password (also set in BIOS). I'm talking about the second one where you set a password for the HD and then you have to enter that password to get to the HD when the machine boots (similar to a power-on P/W). For instance, if I have the HD P/W enabled on a drive that I put in via the Ultra-Bay when the machine is already running, it will "see" the drive, but I can't access any volumes on it until I reboot and provide the appropriate HD password. To be honest, I've never taken a P/W-enabled drive and tired to boot it in a different manufacturer's machine; I've always dealt with ThinkPads.

Now, like you mention, I don't think that it encrypts the data on the drive necessarily, but I thought that it does prevent you from putting the drive in another machine and accessing the data, based on what I've read on other forums. So, no alterations to the data on the platters, but sort of an electronic "key" set on the controller that prevents you from getting to the data w/o it. I'm sure if you had the brains to replace the controller, you could get to the data. In all, a level of security to block the casual thief, but it probably won't stop someone who's serious about getting to your data.

The more I look into security and encryption options and schemes, the more I understand why I keep hearing about government laptops stolen with no security enabled on them.

Too many conflicting schemes, too much worry about getting locked out permanently if one goes bad.

My computer locked up and had to reboot the hard way, and the per-oot screen threw me a security message that made me think I might never access anything on it again. What it was or what triggered it...Dunno, but scenarios like that make me really wonder what would happen if I enabled ALL the options and then, haha, lord help me needed to access a backup to restore something.

Hell, I can't even get to access my original backup information because Lenono made that incompatible when they upgraded one of the applets. I'll have to wipe a drive and really really restore it from scratch (using an old backup) to access any of the information that was supposed to be conveniently with easy reach of restoring.

system froze for 6 minutes ?!?!?!

P.S. somehow I still prefere Samsung SLC 64GB over this one

miro_gt wrote:system froze for 6 minutes ?!?!?!

P.S. somehow I still prefere Samsung SLC 64GB over this one

Hey Miro,

I have solved that problem completely by formatting the Vista and clean install everything.

I still get occasional freezes everyday or two, but only 30sec max. however, this problem might not be there at all with Samsung SLC. And yes I should have bought Samsung SLC.

I think my symptoms come and go depending on the driver you use, Intel Matrix Manager, and the chipsets. Compatibility also plays an important role.

How about Intel X25-E? Unlike X25-M, it is a SLC drive, so maybe it doesn´t cause this kind of freezes

Yeah, I suspected that X25-E should eliminate the freezes problem completely.

But even with X25-M I'm still very happy with the performance. The freezes didn't happen all the time. maybe only once between 2-3hrs period you are working for 30sec interval which is not so bad. I'm sure there is more related to the drivers and optimization, because before I reformatted my Vista, I exprienced a worse 5min freezes. and that one KILLS, and superbly annoying.

I guess something with the software, driver, combination that I also use. Besides, other people with intel X25-M didn't seem to report similar problem.

I can tell you one thing, it's hard to go back to 7k200. My laptop really felt crippled in comparison. I'm already spoiled with X25-M.

jlingo wrote:I guess something with the software, driver, combination that I also use.

Yeah, regarding SSD+ Vista + drivers + BIOS it seems to me that there is still a lot more to be desired, especially in case of MLC drives. On paper (including all the synthetic benchmarks out there, which are by the way still not very suitable for SSDs) many things may look nice, but in a real world environment SSDs still seem to have their problems, affecting overall performance more or less. For now I really can´t call the SSD technology (both on the hardware and software side) mature.

Just my 2 cents