Thinkpads Forum

I'd love to buy an SSD for my T60p but can't justify it at their current prices and small capacities. To get an SSD of decent capacity (256GB or more), that doesn't stutter or experience degraded performance over time, would cost a bundle. Depending on the SSD I bought I might also need to upgrade to Windows 7 (to get Trim, although Windows 7 might be worth the upgrade all on its own). And then I'd be frustrated to have this super fast SSD that only operates at SATA I speeds. Buying a new laptop would be a better use of the money, if I didn't have to give up my UXGA Flexview screen (which I won't do)! Grrrrrr!

As an alternative I'm considering using one of the new, super-fast ExpressCard SSDs that boasts 115/65Mbs read/write speeds (as but one example, see http://www.wintecind.com/FileMate/index_solidgo.htm) with either Ready Boost or eBoostr. For a fraction of the cost a I'd get 80% of the performance gains of an SSD, without their problems. And, I'd still have plenty of storage capacity.

But I have questions, and here's where I need help.

1) Are there hardware issues? Specifically, I'm thinking of two posts: http://forums.macnn.com/104/alternative ... scard-ssd/ and http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=80635.

2) Ready Boost, or eBoostr (I already have a license for it and so wouldn't have to buy it)?

3) More importantly, is it likely to give me the performance boost I want?

4) Has anyone tried this, and if so, what has your experience been?

Thanks.

ThinkPadophile wrote:3) More importantly, is it likely to give me the performance boost I want?

4) Has anyone tried this, and if so, what has your experience been?

Thanks.

I am running Intel 80 gig X25-M SSDs on three different T60 machines and a HP laptop with great success.

You can expect a 30% to 60% increase in speed using a solid state drive vs. a spinning platter hard drive.

Don't be put off by the small size, just run the operating system and programs on the C:\ partition and Documents on the D:\ partition on the same drive. If you have some big multi-media files, they can be run from a regular drive in the Ultra Bay, or an external USB drive.

Speed will still be impressive, even when the machines has to "call" the multi-media file from another drive; the operating system and program files are the bottleneck on a machine.

-Any- operating system will run much faster on a SSD, be it XP, Vista or Windows 7. (A faster hard drive is a faster hard drive, regardless of what is on it)

Simply disable pre-fetch and superfetch and defrag, as they are not needed. No Ready Boost or other scheme will do anything for you. Just have 2 gig of RAM.

Ignore all the other wacky SSD tweak suggestions from other sites.

With a solid state drive you will be spoiled forever. The speed is addictive.

Don't be put off by the small size, just run the operating system and programs on the C:\ partition and Documents on the D:\ partition on the same drive. If you have some big multi-media files, they can be run from a regular drive in the Ultra Bay, or an external USB drive.

Thanks for the reply. It was full of very helpful information. I'm glad to know that an 80GB drive might be large enough. I would be interested, though, in knowing why you keep your data on a separate partition.

I might yet decide to go with an X25-M, which seems to be the best all-around SSD on the market. But I'm still interested in figuring out whether a super-fast ExpressCard, teamed with disk caching software such as ReadyBoost or eBoostr, is a viable alternative to buying an SSD. Besides the obvious cost savings, there are other reasons for my interest. First, if it works it would be a simple solution. Just plug in the ExpressCard, turn on ReadyBoost or install eBoostr, reboot the computer, and let it build its cache. No installing new operating systems and reinstalling apps, no copying disks, etc. Second, it might be a workable solution for owners of T43/T43p that have an PCIe slot but can't use SATA drives, which is what most of the good SSDs are. Finally it could be used on any Thinkpad that has a USB2 port (since these cards often have a USB2 connector on them).

ThinkPadophile wrote:I would be interested, though, in knowing why you keep your data on a separate partition.

Keeping the operating system and program files separate from data files allows for much easier computer management. When imaging a drive, why copy over 50 gig or so, when one can just create a smaller 15-30 gig image, and backup one's personal data on a separate drive.

Having everything on C:\ is one of computing's worst ideas.

mgo wrote:Having everything on C:\ is one of computing's worst ideas.

Couldn't agree more

I like your idea about separating programs and data. Makes sense.

I am running Intel 80 gig X25-M SSDs on three different T60 machines and a HP laptop with great success.

I understand that X25-M G1 (first generation models) drives will not support Trim. Does flashing the latest firmware revision to X25-M G1 drives eliminate the performance degradation problem?

ThinkPadophile wrote:I understand that X25-M G1 (first generation models) drives will not support Trim. Does flashing the latest firmware revision to X25-M G1 drives eliminate the performance degradation problem?

I have not owned the SSD long enough, nor have I run the firmware update long enough to tell what the results are.

Perhaps you could go to:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_ ... ldID=17485

for the readme files and other docs that are listed.

Microsoft and everybody else seems quite vague about TRIM, so who the heck knows how the SSDs will perform down the road. Most of the articles about TRIM appear to be lazy copy and paste hack jobs from alleged computer "experts".

The firmware upgrade is pretty easy to run, by the way and seems stable on my T60, and my HP.

ALSO: Here is a post from somebody who seems to know how to check if TRIM is enabled:

"An answer to this question was published in the comments section on the Engineering 7 blog post about SSD and Windows 7.
To find out if Windows 7 is sending the TRIM command you can run the following command from an elevated prompt:
fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify
and how to interpret this based on a comment.
"...if fsutil reports that "DisableDeleteNotify" is 0, then Trim is enabled. (The feature is sometimes referred to using different names: Trim == Delete Notification == Unused Clusters Hint.) The setting is written in terms of disabling something because we like to use values of 0 for defaults.
Have Trim enabled according to this setting, which you do, means that the filesystem will send Trim commands down the storage stack. The filesystem doesn't actually know whether this command will be supported or not at a lower level. When the disk driver receives the command, it will either act on it or ignore it. If you know for sure that your storage devices don't support Trim, you could go ahead and disable Trim (enable DisableDeleteNotify) so the filesystem won't bother to send down these notifications. However sending down the notifications is pretty lightweight and I haven't seen any performance improvement by disabling them, so I don't recommend disabling this setting. If you have an SSD which does support Trim, then you definitely don't want to disable it, because there are some performance gains to be had for leaving the setting in its default form."
It seems that this still won't tell you if the drive and or firmware for the drive supports TRIM. Sigh."

I appreciate the posts and helpful information, but let me return the discussion to my original intent.

It's hard for me to justify paying $200+ and giving up my 320GB HDD for a 60-80GB SSD. That's going backwards. And it's also hard to justify spending $600 or more for a 256GB SSD, especially when hardware limits me to only 150MB/s speeds. I'm looking for a middle way, and I'm hoping these expresscards can provide it.

The 9-21-2009 review HERE gives the experience of someone who used one on a T61. He reported quite impressive results. My theory is that eBoostr would make it even better. eBoostr uses the expresscard as a cache device for frequently used files, and it gives you the capability of pinning specific apps into the cache. Simply tell the program what you want it to cache, build the cache file, and enjoy. eBoostr automatically redirects the read operation away from the HDD and to the expresscard so you get SSD-like load speeds without having to reinstall anything. I just seems to me like a simple, effective solution. And because eBoostr directs write operations to the HDD and then updates the cache file as a background operation during idle time, stuttering should not be a problem.

I've raised the question on eBoostr's forum. If you're interested you can read the discussion HERE.

To be honest, I've held off buying one until I heard from others who have tried it. Who knows, maybe the performance gains don't justify the cost?

Finally, for T61 owners, you might consider joining eBoostr's Beta testing program. The newest version will offer the ability to use unmanaged memory (the memory above 3.25GB that 32-bit Windows doesn't recognize) as a RAM cache. In the past eBoostr rewarded Beta testers with a free, life-time license. The new version won't help me with my T60p but it could be useful for your T61.

Thanks again for the inputs. Hope I didn't come on too strong here.

OK, I broke down and bought one. It is a 48GB Wintec Filemate Ultra SSD, which boasts sequential read/write speeds of 125/65 MB/s. I use it, either in conjunction with ReadyBoost or eBoostr, as a fast disk cache. My goal is to create a hybrid system that reaches near-SSD performance at a fraction of the cost and without the problems SSDs experience (stuttering, performance degradation over time).

In response to my list of questions in my original post, here's what I've found so far:
1) "Are there any hardware issues?" None I've found so far, except that it is apparently not possible to use these devices as boot drives since BIOS doesn't support them directly (i.e. without loading a driver first). Some users reported their getting rather hot, but I've not experienced that yet, probably because the only write operations are when it rebuilds its cache, which is relatively infrequent.
2) "What kind of performance can I expect?" I'm looking for valid benchmarks that can give me an objective appraisal. Experience tells me that apps lauch significantly faster. CrystalDiskMark shows that it easily outperforms my fast HDD (a 320GB WD Scorpio Black). On small (4K) reads it is 25X faster than the hard drive. Even at large block reads it is almost 2X as fast as the hard drive. But again, I've only benchmarked it with CrystalDiskMark thus far.
3) "ReadyBoost or eBoostr?" I've tried both and right now I'm using eBoostr. I'm running Vista Ultimate 32-bit, and Vista's ReadyBoost only supports 4GB max. eBoostr allows me to create a cache of any size, and to pin apps to the cache. So far I've only been able to get eBoostr to cache around 10GB of files. It would be better if eBoostr would allow me to pin entire directories, but it doesn't and that limits what I can achieve using it.
4) "Has anyone tried this, and if so what's your experience?" No one responded.

The bottom line is that I'm impressed so far, but I don't think the system is yet reaching its full potential. My open questions:
1) Are there other, more accurate benchmarks that I should try?
2) Since its sequential read speed is nearly 2X that of my hard drive, would I gain performance if I used the device for my pagefile?
3) Are there other "tweaks" I should try?
4) I'm wondering if Windows 7's improved version of ReadyBoost would offer any advantages over eBoostr? Does anyone have any experience? For instance, does W7 ReadyBoost allow me to pin apps, or to pin entire directories?

Thanks, folks.