Thinkpads Forum

Hi,
I know the T420 has a Sata II bandwidth on its PCIe slot where I installed the Crucial m4 mSata 128GB SSD but should the Sequencial reading and writing speed be so low? It´s reaching 262.6MB/s on reading and 179.3MB/s on writing... I did a windows 7 clean install on it. Is this what I should expect?

Thanks

It certainly doesn't seem bad at all...

That's about right for SATA II speeds.

Both your read speed and write speed are dead on with where they are supposed to be. The Marvell 88SS9174 controller is a slower at writing, and you would see these same write speeds if you had it connected to a SATA III.

Thanks for the support guys!

Vonfeffer wrote:Hi,
I know the T420 has a Sata II bandwidth on its PCIe slot where I installed the Crucial m4 mSata 128GB SSD but should the Sequencial reading and writing speed be so low? It´s reaching 262.6MB/s on reading and 179.3MB/s on writing... I did a windows 7 clean install on it. Is this what I should expect?

Thanks

So with SATA III mSATA SSD's we are not getting the 500MBps or so per the specs? So does that mean the T420 and X220 series are throttled by SATAII on both the PCIe and the main SATA ports?

JPH wrote:So with SATA III mSATA SSD's we are not getting the 500MBps or so per the specs? So does that mean the T420 and X220 series are throttled by SATAII on both the PCIe and the main SATA ports?

No, the main SATA ports get the full SATA III power for the T420 and later.

Ok thanks. So just to sum up: main HDD is full SATA 6Gbps and the rest SATA 3Gbps. Fair enough, so no difference if we get a SATAII as opposed to a SATAIII mSATA drive in the mini PCIe slot then.

JPH wrote: so no difference if we get a SATAII as opposed to a SATAIII mSATA drive in the mini PCIe slot then.

I wouldn't necessarily go that far. In my experience, a SATA III drive running at SATA II speeds is still faster with the random reads than a SATA II drive.

There won't be much of a practical difference unless you're putting a heavy load on the controller, which typical notebook usage does not do.

ZaZ wrote:There won't be much of a practical difference unless you're putting a heavy load on the controller, which typical notebook usage does not do.

Agreed. It is one of those things where it may not be a noticeable difference, but it is a measurable difference. Benchmarking applications certainly do not qualify as typical usage.