Thinkpads Forum

In benchmarks, Intel X25-M has 250MB/s max read speed, but in real life tests like windows startup and application loading it is about 100MB. So I am wondering how does 100MB/s limitation of older Thinkpads affects this performance? Is it 2.5 times lower (40MB/s), like read speed? Or is it full 100MB per second that SATA on Thinkpad can handle?

There's more to a SSD than booting fast. Any limitation is a limitation (in real life). If the CPU is requesting a file to be decoded/processed and it's being limited by read speed then obviously it wont get to the CPU as fast as it could have. Or say some needs to be cached to RAM and some to the GPU and some to the CPU, all these devices will be starved for data when they could be getting it a lot faster if the CAP wasn't implemented. It also makes sense that the read speeds can directly affect battery life. The longer the system takes at a task the longer it takes to go back to idle state which is 90% of the time.

I've put an Intel Gen 2 160 Gb in my T60p. I know I'm not getting the highest possible speed, but I can assure you that the drive is noticeably faster than a 7200 rpm HDD. As a bonus, it's completely silent. Definitely an upgrade I would recommend.

For what it's worth HD Tune shows 114 MB/s transfer rate, access time 0,1s.

asdf35asdf wrote:In benchmarks, Intel X25-M has 250MB/s max read speed, but in real life tests like windows startup and application loading it is about 100MB. So I am wondering how does 100MB/s limitation of older Thinkpads affects this performance? Is it 2.5 times lower (40MB/s), like read speed? Or is it full 100MB per second that SATA on Thinkpad can handle?

The drive will transfer at a speed that is the lower of (drive capabilities) and (bus capabilities) for any given task. In this case, it will be 100-odd MB/s. The drive's max speed doesn't really come into the equation here*.

As an aside, the first SATA standard has a official max transfer rate of around 143 MB/s, not 100 MB/s.

And as you probably know, there more to SSDs than raw transfer speed.


* save for some possible inoptimal caching/buffering strategies because they were optimized for SATA 2. This will be a very small effect.

For mine one I am getting 141Mb/sec on my T61