Has anyone tried an SSD in the X41? *PICS*

[gongo2k1]

6 CDs?? that's a heck of a windows install! it sounds like maybe you created a recovery partition too.

[aceo07]

bruno, maybe you should try running a harddrive benchmark and see how fast it's going. It's something hard to tell just by 'feel'.

[Bruno]

bruno, maybe you should try running a harddrive benchmark and see how fast it's going. It's something hard to tell just by 'feel'.

I know guys, but i thought that the start up time will be faster, but it aint.
Of course i made recovery CD's, how else do you want to keep the WIN XP licence?

[dstrauss]

If you installed from the recovery disks, you basically recreated the hidden IBM partition on your boot CF (about 5.5gb) and then Thinkvantage installs Windows from there. I don't think there is an option to not set up this partition from the recovery CD's - your only choice is a custom Windows install done by yourself, or you could try to unsecure the recovery partition from the bios setup, then use a partition managing program to "recapture" the hidden partition into your boot partition.

[weepy]

bruno, maybe you should try running a harddrive benchmark and see how fast it's going. It's something hard to tell just by 'feel'.

I know guys, but i thought that the start up time will be faster, but it aint.
Of course i made recovery CD's, how else do you want to keep the WIN XP licence?

Bruno I did exactly the same thing as you, with same motives. Try and read about my experience few pages back in this thread. I deleted the recovery partition and reclaimed those 5.5Gigs back as D: drive. I did quite a lot of tweaking to get the factory install where I wanted it, but it booted faster anyway that the original hitachi disk. Down from 2 : xx minutes to 58s or so, still too much since standard clean XP boots 10s on it, but definitely better. Things I did were removing some ThinkVantage apps from the Run registry key, updating TabTip.exe, because it is the culprit of the cursor stuttering issue, turning off pagefile and ntfs accesstime updating, uninstalled symantec security, stopped some unnecessary services. Now I boot 17s to logon and another 12s to usable desktop. I am content.

[tim S]

I get slightly faster boot times than 'weepy' but I arrived at mine more by accident rather than having a plan! Maybe it was just a by-product of XP loading onto an Extreme III 8Gig San Disk card on a single Addonics CF adapter.
There is no pagefile.sys in C:\ , page file sizes are shown in Device Manager but with zero allocated. A page file of some kind is created on each boot at the 'Welcome' screen, then I have to push Atl Ctrl Del to finalize into XP.
There is no system restore, or if there, is it's turned off (not by me).
I'm not recognized as an 'Administrator' for some reason, so there are no updates.
All the programs I need, including the OS, only take up about 2.5 gigs on the card, I'm guessing it's so small because so few of XP's programs and processes actually loaded, lucky me!
My X40 with XP SP3 really flies becuse virtually nothing, or very little, seems to be working behind the scenes.
Tim S

[Beaubarre]

Thanks a lot for this forum.

Following most of the posts, I purchased the Addonics dual IDE CF adapter at Webconnexxion as I'm in Europe, and Transcend 300X 8 Go compact flash.

All worked fine on my Thinkpad X40 under MacOSX Leopard.

I have done a web page on my Thinkpad X40 with all the different mods, as I have also replaced the screen, added internal bluetooth and replaced the Wifi card (for Leopard).

[tokyo_x40]

I am happy to report on the conversion of a X40 from the 40GB HD (Hitachi) to a CF card (Transcend 300x).

First, thanks very much Seb for your post, very useful. I also found this wiki entry useful.

Q: Has anyone tried a new 16GB fast card? for example
SanDisk Extreme IV CompactFlash 16GB SDCFX4-016G-901 (sorry, url link mangled by forum)

... and besides cost (which always goes down) is there a reason why a X40 couldn't run two? (with the correct adapter)

Thanks

[MitchSF]

Sorry if this has been asked before. I have an X41, Addonics, and a Transcend 8 gig 300x CF card.

I'm not sure where to start with nlite. Apparently I can't use the 6 cd restore set. I do have an old corporate XP Pro cd. Is that the only way to do this, along with downloading Thinkvantage, drivers, and service pack 3?

I read the whole thread, but I'm still not sure about this.

Thanks in advance.

Mitch

[weepy]

My factory install left about 2 Gigs free on 10G system partition of my 16GB Transcend CF. Rest was the unavoidable recovery partition. It seems that factory install is a no go for capacities under 16G...

[tokyo_x40]

Apparently I can't use the 6 cd restore set. I do have an old corporate XP Pro cd. Is that the only way to do this, along with downloading Thinkvantage, drivers, and service pack 3?

Not sure what nlite is, I'm new here myself! But about xp, I suggest you take a look for "making windows faster" or "making a sp3 cd" link. With certain tools it is possible to make a install CD specifically for your image of windows, without wasting 5gb of space for the recovery drive. Many people on these forums don't have any form of CD, but they do have their (perfectly legal) installation of windows with their registration code. Ripping your own installation cd uses the same registration code you already have.

... I haven't done it in ages or I'd offer a link. Anyone know a wiki or how-to for sp3?

[flypenfly]

Just purchased an X41 with a 60gb internal drive.

Is there any way I can use a CF adapter in the PCMCIA slot as a boot drive?

[MitchSF]

I just noticed that the price of the 8GB 300x Transcend card dropped to $89.95, on Amazon. I called and got a $40 credit. I probably should have just gone for the 16gb card, and I may still decide to do that, especially if the price on it drops soon, too.

Another possibility is to try xplite on the current installation, then back up using thinkvantage utilities to cds, and restore to CF. I'll check into that, but I don't want to invest much more time in the project, since I'm thinking hard about a T400 or X300.

Thanks for the advice.

Mitch

[sjthinkpader]

I had a 8GB CF card running in a T23 for a while. See the May, 12th post and others in this thread:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... d&start=30

Wanting a X series for the reduced weight, I finally got a cheap X40 (type 2386, 1.2Ghz Banias) in good shape to try it. I have 2 adapters, one fits a full length 2.5 inch HDD slot and one fit the Hitachi short slot. Both were purchased at a small shop near Akihabara in Tokyo. The short adapter fit the X40 perfectly.

The adapter has only 44 pins which fit the 44 pin socket in the X40 (pin compatible with 48 pin sockets). The four pins on the end are missing. BTW, I had to remove the palm rest to install the CF adapter properly. The adapter is installed upside down same as the HDD. Since my X40 came without a HDD installed, it took me a while to get the CF/adapter working.

The T23 WindowsXP install BSOD in the X40 so I did a complete new WinXP install from scratch.

This 8GB RiDATA CF card has reasonably fast write speed and cost about $30 at Fry's this past weekend.

[schen]

Wanting a X series for the reduced weight, I finally got a cheap X40 (type 2386, 1.2Ghz Banias) in good shape to try it. I have 2 adapters, one fits a full length 2.5 inch HDD slot and one fit the Hitachi short slot. Both were purchased at a small shop near Akihabara in Tokyo. The short adapter fit the X40 perfectly.

Does this adapter hold one card or two?

[sjthinkpader]

Both my short one and full size (HDD size) adapter has only one CF slot. Someone has a two slot adapter.

[tim S]

Addonics out of San Jose CA sells the 1 and 2 card adapters.
I have both but I found the dual adapter won't boot with the San Disk Extreme III cards in both slots. Other CF brands maybe fine.
Using my 8 GIG SD EIII card in the single adapter there is no problem loading XP from the CD and booting.
System restore and automatic updating won't load and a pagefile has to be created on each boot. Writes are sometimes a little slow but everything else is much much faster compared to the original hard drive.
Without system restore, system updates and with XP putting the pagefile in memory, the total load space is only 4,09G leaving 3.53G free and that's with XP SP3 and a lot of applications!
Tim S

[sjthinkpader]

The RiDATA 233x 8GB card and the adapter I am using in the X40 act just like a HDD with no particularities.

I am type this post on it now.

The write speed of this card is spec'ed at around 12MB/sec while most Sandisk Extreme III are spec'ed at 30MB/sec. Extreme IV are spec'ed at 40MB/sec.

[TheBigHunt]

Hello
Does anyone try a build a raid volume with a dual CF adaptator ?
Software raid in windows for exemple ?
Regards
TheBigHunt

[limaciform]

Hi everyone. Great thread.

I aquired a X41 tablet to try this SSD mod (and of course the tablet experience). I'm using the addonics adapter with a transcend CF-card.

This setup works fine with windows XP. However after having tried the tablet functionality of windows vista on my hdd, I wanted to try this on the CF as well. This is where I'm having some difficulties.

The installation seems to work fine until I get to the last step of the installation ("windows finalizing installation" I believe). At this point the installation seems to have entered an infinite loop of sorts. It doesn't freeze it just doesn't finish.

My question; can anyone confirm if it is possible to install Vista with the setup I have? Has anyone managed to finish the installation?

Any help/feedback appreciated!

[Frank]

i've installed vista on my x41 (non tablet) and it worked fine. but i used vlite to create the setup dvd (with integrated sp1) and save space on the little 8GB sandisk extreme 4 card. however ... with only 8gb it's not usable.

[sjthinkpader]

32GB CF cards are about $125 in the U.S. Probably close to the cost of a 40GB short HDD.

[sebtomato]

32GB CF cards are about $125 in the U.S.

Looking at what's available on eBay, I think you would get something quite slow for that price (probably, 100x, or about 15MB/sec in read, and much slower in write). In that case, the memory card would probably be worse in performance than the standard HD. To be some improvements over the standard HR, you need at least 233x or 300x, in both read and write.

[sebtomato]

Just another piece of advice: you can sell the standard HD coming with the X40 for pretty much the same price as a quality 8GB CF, making the conversion very cheap (even if you loose some space in the process, performance would be much better).

I bought a Transcend 300x 8GB card (working at least twice faster than the HD) for about £70, and I sold the original 40GB HD on eBay for £65.

It looks like the original HDs are rare and therefore still worth quite a lot of money on eBay, even when used. Another reason to get rid of them and go for a DIY SSD!

[sjthinkpader]

32GB CF cards are about $125 in the U.S.

Looking at what's available on eBay, I think you would get something quite slow for that price (probably, 100x, or about 15MB/sec in read, and much slower in write). In that case, the memory card would probably be worse in performance than the standard HD. To be some improvements over the standard HR, you need at least 233x or 300x, in both read and write.

Even a 60x card will seem fast for browser use. This is because there are a high number of files in a typical web page. You can see this by saving a web page. The seek time in HDD give CF a huge advantage.

With only 8GB including OS, it will be unlikely this machine will store a lot of pictures and songs. These large files give the large file size read and write operation advantage to HDD.

32GB cards are faster simply due to higher density newer Flash chips inside. This is due to faster speed from smaller wafer lithography geometry used. I have some dog slow 1GB Sandisk CF card from 4-5 years ago. Even a Class 4 SD cards work faster (4MB write).

These 60x, 100x, 233x ratings are read speeds, write speed spec are more meaningful because they are slower. Unfortunately one needs to find the card spec in question for the write speed rating. The RiDATA 233x 8GB I have is 12MB/sec write but 35MB/sec read.

[epellereau]

Hi, just a quick answer to people asking about Raid0 support.
It sort of work: you can have 2 CF cards in Raid0 (with a dual adapter).
However, Intel's chipset specs are depressing:
"Both devices attached to a connector can be programmed for bus master transfers, but only one device per connector can be active at a time."
Basically, only 1 cf can be read at a time: no perf gain with the raid0 setup.

I have this setup under Linux, (2 16G sandisk ExtremeIII) and if i Launch 2 hdparm commands at the same time (one for each card), I see the transfer speed for each card roughly divided by 2.

To sum-up:
Raid0 is working,but brings NO perf enhancement. (reading 2 drives at the same time is as fast as 1 at a time because of chipset limitations)

Sorry for all of you who wished (as I did...) to get 2 cheap/slow/small cards, and raid them to get the best out of them!

[gongo2k1]

well, you might not see substantial improvement using a master/slave pair using a pata connection on the same channel, but using the separate channel (the one in the dock) you might see a larger gain.

[epellereau]

Sure, but if you want to use the addonics dual adapter to get a raid setup, no increase on performance on simultaneous reads... or write.

[sebtomato]

Even a 60x card will seem fast for browser use. This is because there are a high number of files in a typical web page. You can see this by saving a web page. The seek time in HDD give CF a huge advantage.

Sorry, I am not sure to understand what you are saying. As far as I know, a 100x card is going at 15MB/sec, regardless of its capacity. A 66x 32GB card will not be faster than a 300x 8GB card, regardless of the types of files stored. I don't think the size of the card is relevant to its speed.

The Transcend card I bought is rated as 300x, and does around 45MB/sec in both read and write speed. Many cards like 133x have indeed a read speed of 133x 150KB/sec, but a much slower write speed.

[faberryman]

[quote="epellereau"]Sure, but if you want to use the addonics dual adapter to get a raid setup, no increase on performance on simultaneous reads... or write.[/quote]

Two 8GB cards in a RAID configuration do however make one 16GB volume. If there is no speed degradation, this may prove helpful in certain setups.