Thinkpads Forum

I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad x200s secondhand. I thought, well why not try a Intel X25-M G2 80GB SSD with it.

At first I was disappointed about the boot speed of the BIOS, not the OS, the OS was pretty fine, I thought.
Now, I read some older posts hear about Turbo Memory and how it can slow down your mashine.
Well I had 2 GB of Turbo Memory installed -> hm, should I take it out? I gave it a try just now.

It is unbelievable how fast the mashine goes now! BIOS loaded, OS loaded...!
Win7 32 bit rating of the primary hard disk is just sick -> 7.7!
Win7 32 bit rating with Turbo Memory installed, was 5.9!

Do you have Turbo Memory installed and use it alongside an SSD?
For the love of God take it out!

sent you a pm

..."It is not recommended to use Intel Turbo Memory in a system with a SSD drive.
It would be ideal to remove the Intel Turbo Memory module from the system,
if SSD drive is used. Refer the hardware maintenance manual.
Or set to disable Intel Turbo Memory as follows.
Start Intel Turbo Memory Console.
Uncheck "Enable Windows ReadyBoost" and "Enable Windows ReadyDrive"...
from
Intel Turbo Memory Driver for Windows 7 and Vista
- ThinkPad Reserve Edition, R61, R400, R500, T61, T61p, T400, T400s, T500, W500, W700, W700ds,
X61, X61s, X61 Tablet, X200, X200s, X200 Tablet, X300, X301
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-67820
Version: 1.10.1.1002-8.9.2.1002 Release Date: 2009/11/30
7zin85ww.exe 10,283,560 Intel Turbo Memory Driver
7zin85ww.txt 12,654 README for Intel Turbo Memory Driver
Document id: MIGR-67820 Last modified: 2009-12-04

Turbo Memory is a (twice) failed product. It came out around the same time as Vista, when Vista requires around 2GB ram to run nice. It was supposed to speed up machines with traditional hard disk and very few ram. I remember reading a Anandtech or Toms article testing Turbo Memory, basically you need to have a machine with 1GB or even 512MB (or less) RAM to see the difference. Right after it was released, RAM price plummeted and 2GB or 4GB ram became very affordable, and this thing became useless.

Still, Intel release newer Turbo Memory module with more NAND flash on it, 2GB this time. One would think that offloading some read/write to the NAND flash on it could speed up the machine, at least a little bit, right? Then SSD started to become affordable, and read/write on SSD are typically much faster than Turbo Memory. So Turbo Memory went from no speed difference (with traditional hard drive), to dragging down the machine (with SSD).

Intel should just give up this stupid Turbo Memory thing.

I have a x200s with turbo memory installed. The system came with Vista and a 160GB hard drive. I started downgrading the OS to XP Pro and it does not support turbo memory. I subsequently upgraded to SSD and Windows 7.

In terms of Ready Drive and Ready Boost, it is correct that it actually drags the system down. So I did the following:
Go to Turbo Memory Console and disable RD and RB.
Go to Disk Management and remove the partition the RD and RB created.
With a 2GB Turbo Memory card, you will now see a roughly 1.3GB partition.
Create a regular Windows partition and assign it a drive letter and format to NTFS.
In IE, change the Temporary Internet Files to this new drive letter.
In your enviromental variables list, change the location of "temp" and "tmp" to this drive letter.

What this does and why?
1. Use the Turbo Memory card as a small flash hard disk.
2. Relocate temp internet files and temp files so they utitlize this small flash drive.
3. For temp files and temp internet files, which both are small files, the performance difference between using the Turbo Memory or SSD is not noticeable.
4. Since Windows writes/deletes many many of these small files, I am reducing the wear on my SSD.
5. If you have plenty of memory, you can also move the pagefile onto the Turbo Memory drive and size it down to 128MB or 256MB, just enough for memory dump if a BSOD occurs. Otherwise, with enough RAM, pagefile is rarely accessed and affect little performance.