SSD for X61

[Eudoxus]

I am considering moving to SSD drive in my X61s to improve performance and battery life (if it is worth the money). Cab you recommend some particular drives with the best price and performance ration for this model. I mean especially SATA I limitation of the system board which seems to make top SSD drives for this machine quite worthless. The optimal volume of a drive should be about 80Gb.

[Harryc]

If you can wait until the end of this year the Intel X25-V will have an 80GB version and it is expected to be very reasonably priced.
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/13815/int ... index.html

The 40GB version is already on the market - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... &Tpk=x25-v

[Eudoxus]

Thank for info, Harry!
The price of 40GB version seems reasonable but it is a bit too small for my needs. The end of this year seems to bee very far from now, but lets see. Time goes faster than we expect sometimes.

[immaculate]

The SATA1 limitation was a consideration of mine, but I ended up with a few Intel X25-M G2s and one went in the X61s. I am very pleased with the performance, even if it is only SATA1 performance =]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronliao/3883634708/

aaron

[Eudoxus]

Can you notice any considerable improvements of battery life?

[immaculate]

Can you notice any considerable improvements of battery life?

I run the 8cell batt on mine and I would say that the improvement is probably about 20 minutes under travel use (the only time I ever really notice battery life is when there are no sockets to be found )

aaron

[MiRacL]

I'm using a Supertalent Ultradrive GX 64gb in my X60.
Can't say i've noticed much on the battery life difference.
Was using a 200gb 7200rpm drive before.

But the computer is much faster. After som tweaking i was able to boot into ubuntu in about 7 seconds. Im running windows 7 at the momen, and it's working great with an ssd.

[paul*robertson]

I'm a novice to a lot of this, do you just swap the drives over and clone, or do you have to alter a lot of other stuff too ie BIOS and the like.

I have an X61 with the standard 80gb HD. I would only swap for more speed, not really extra battery life.

[Harryc]

Swapping in an SSD is just like any other HDD, you just clone to the new drive. There are no BIOS settings to be done, but there are a few tweaks to be made to the OS once cloned. For example, it is better to run Windows 7 because it supports 'trim' natively for SSD's. You can google 'SSD trim' to see what that's all about.

[hp79]

I'm using intel x25-m 80gb g2 on x61t. I hate that x61t only supports SATA 1, but still it is fast. After the upgrade 6 months ago, I feel my CPU is the bottleneck now. Especially when using my digitizer writing on onenote.

[ThinkRob]

I mean especially SATA I limitation of the system board which seems to make top SSD drives for this machine quite worthless.

Not at all!

The 1.5Gbit limit will indeed limit your sequential transfer rates, but that doesn't really matter. The strength of top SSDs lies not in the impressive-looking sequential speeds (the big, fancy numbers that manufacturers love to quote), but in their random read/write performance, particularly when under load. That aspect of performance is far, far, *far* more important for desktop usage (as most desktop usage involves small random reads/writes), and is not impacted by the bus limit (no drive can do small random reads/writes fast enough to hit the cap.)

A top-end drive like one of the X25 series will definitely *not* be a worthless addition to your X61.

[bananaman]

A top-end drive like one of the X25 series will definitely *not* be a worthless addition to your X61.

+1

I moved my X61 from a 7200rpm drive to an Intel X25-M G2 SSD, and I can say that the difference is night and day. It's like a different machine.

[wolfman]

I agree. I added the X25-M G2 to my X61 right around the time I was thinking it might be worthwhile to trade up to a core i5 series machine... took the need for that away - at least for a while anyway.

[copec]

Hi,

I have just bought an Intel 80GB SSD X25 G2 which I have installed into my X61 tablet.

I did a backup of the old HDD using W7 backup and then proceeded to restore it onto the SSD using a recovery disk.

All completed OK until the system rebooted at the end. The system now hangs on 'Starting Windows'.

I then blatted the disk and did a clean install of W7. This went OK until it rebooted at the final stages of the install.

The BIOS is v1.24. I have AHCI enabled and have also run the firmware update CD for the Thinkpad (specifically the SSD firmware ugrade) and the Intel Firmware upgrade CD. The Thinkpad version only has a handful of Samsung and one Intel SSD listed (which is not the same as mine) so it doesn't update anything, and the Intel one says it is all on the latest firmware.

Can those who have got this working please let me know what BIOS & settings they are using to get past this obstacle?

Thanks


Chris.

[davekung]

Chris,

I have a OCZ Vertex SSD 60G in my X61 Tablet. Not sure how relevant would my BIOS settings to your situation.
I did a clean install as well (no recovery partition).
BIOS Version 1.24
EC ver:1.02
SATA Mode: AHCI


I would suggest that you reformat the whole SSD and redo a clean install. My undertanding is SSD memory geometric is entirely different than that of a traditional HD. If you do clean install, WIN 7 will property align the partiton with the SSD sectors for best peformance.

Do you have a SATA to USB enclosure to test the drive before you install Win 7?

Best of luck,

David

[copec]

Hi David,

I managed to get it all working last week. The issue seemed to be that I couldn't restore a W7 system disk which had the SATA mode in BIOS set as 'compatibility' when I had set the BIOS to AHCI for the SSD.

I ended up setting to AHCI and doing a fresh install. This worked OK and has been running happily for a week now.

There is a way of getting the old system back so I don't have to install everything again (which I have done now anyway - always good to have a purge now and again).

If I had put the old HDD back in and changed the registry as per the MS technote below it would I could have then done a full system backup and done the restore onto the SSD having changed the SATA mode to be AHCI.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

Cheers & thanks for taking the time & effort to reply - appreciated.

Chris.

[koray]

I've got an X25 G2 80GB on my X61T for over 8 months now. I don't miss a thing from those old spinning HDDs. Add ThinkpadFanControl6.2 into this and I am enjoying hours of typing in a quiet room with only noise from my key strokes. I can say my current combo is the best I've ever had.

K.

[copec]

Mine would be silent too but the fan has a problem and makes an almightly racket. It needs replacing!
I have the fan control software which is very good given the fan noise - helps me turn it off!

Cheers

[dejx]

Hey guys,

Just about now my ISP had some problems with connection so i had to swap disks (to get movies ) ) and I've decided to record difference between SSD and HDD boot.

Here are videos:
HDD: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBUWdBeqRZs
SSD: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BvC4FujJY0

BTW: is that light on bottom-left corner normal or? (ssd video on 0:22)

Bye!