Thinkpads Forum

I'm curious if anyone knows the manufacturers of the 64GB and 128GB SSDs offered in the T400/500 series, and if anyone has any direct experience with them.

The biggest questionmarks for me about stumping up the cash for an SSD are reliability and read/write times, both of which have been achilles heels for SSD in the past few years. It'll be about six months before I buy a new Thinkpad but I'm considering an SSD mainly for battery life savings but if they are still way slower than high-speed HDDs then I probably won't bother.

I believe the manufacturer of both SSDs you are referring to is Samsung. As for these two particular SSDs, they definitely outperform any HD suitable for a laptop by impressive difference(and even most desktop HDs if not all of them) and don´t have any problems with reliability. However, you will probably need to apply some OS tweaks depending on your preferred OS in order to guarantee proper work and max performance of those drives. For reference, I would suggest you to search in this forum, in particular in X300 and x60 subforums, or google a bit (the especially the OCZ forum seems to have somewhat complete list of such tweaks). Just a side note: As of now I don´t think it is really clear if SSDs give better battery life than regular HDs, but I might be very well wrong...

Hope this helps

Marin

The difference in battery life will not be huge. The HD only uses around 10% of the power in an X series, and lower percentage in a T series. Plus an SSD doesn't magically eliminate the power drain, it uses power too. Wildly guessing: half as much as a regular HD? So you are looking at a 5% gain in battery at most...

The main reasons to get an SSD are performance (they are way faster than regular HDs) and quietness.

So the read/write speed issues of old have been fixed? Access speed has always been lightening fast but read/write was not always so compared to 7200 HDDs (I may be a bit out of date, I admit)

pipspeak wrote:So the read/write speed issues of old have been fixed? Access speed has always been lightening fast but read/write was not always so compared to 7200 HDDs (I may be a bit out of date, I admit)

I´m not sure what you are exactly referring to as "issues"..., which models of SSDs... I would say that there are three kinds of SSDs at this moment: The first one are very-low cost SSDs which target at longer battery life (though it´s questionable if they really manage that...) and have quite bad overall performance compared to modern laptop HDs. The second type of HDDs are middle-priced (well quite wide range of prices actually, varying from 100-800 $ -> also depending on their capacities, but say for about 60 GBs the price range is about 200-500 € depending here only on the model), most of them are MLC-based. They often require OS adjustments ("tweaks") to optimize their performance (incl. to work around issues). But then, with these "tweaks" applied they have outstanding performance (!). And the third type of SSDs are the extremely expensive ones, they are SLC based and AFAIK they require almost no OS adjustments (please correct me if I´m wrong here), i.e. they will have outstanding performance no matter you are going to apply those tweaks or not (however, applying some of the hacks may prolong their life-span). I hope things now look a little bit more clear And I suppose the answer to your question is "Yes"

Hope this helps

Marin

Note: the the price ranges given above are rather to illustrate things

Thanks... I guess I'd read only about the cheap and middle tier SSDs that potentially had far slower read/write speeds than fast HDDs.

The problem is coming from Lenovo TP which sports SATA150.
I've an Intel X25E SLC which tops at 130Mo/s write& read instead of > 200 Mo/s

pipspeak wrote:Thanks... I guess I'd read only about the cheap and middle tier SSDs that potentially had far slower read/write speeds than fast HDDs.

Anyway get a SLC (a Mtron 3525 32 Gb= 200 € in France)