What SSD in T400s?

[FragrantHead]

If you've read the reviews on sites like Anandtech you're probably aware that SSDs are still an emerging technology. At the risk of oversimplifying, those reviews can be summed up as follows: Only Intel have got it right (in the consumer space). Their drives have the best real-world performance characteristics. In particular they excel at the all-important small-file write performance, the achilles heel of virtually every other product out there, which the Intel SSDs will typically beat by an order of magnitude. With the latest firmware they also do not suffer from gradual performance degradation anymore, another common problem with SSDs. When you then consider that the price of their latest 34mm flash-based product has come down into line with competitors, there really is no point in buying anything else right now. All of which brings me to the question, what's in the T400s? I know it's not Intel, because that only comes in capacities of 80M and 160M, as far as I'm aware. I've seen a picture of a T400s SSD, which appeared to be a Toshiba part. Does anyone know where to find a review of that SSD? What SSD is in your T400s?

[Quicklite]

As far as I know, those are Toshiba parts, there is a chance it would be Samsung MLC.

These Toshiba parts are custom made drives, based on revision B of the infamous Jmicron controller, but has 4x onboard cache (64kb), as well as custom made firmware, in comparison to the Jmicron based drives we know; and with the tweaks, its said to have resolved the stuttering issue.

Model: THNS128GG4BAAA-FDE or THNS128GG4BAAA-N

Offical spec:http://www.toshiba.com/taec/news/press_ ... 08_550.jsp

It's suppose to be slower than both first and second gen Samsung, and the X18-m.Though it would be much faster than normal 1.8' HDDs, which are very slow, for normal users, it would make a huge difference; but neither Samsung's second gen MLC nor that Toshiba SSD will be match the pace of X18-M in terms of responsiveness, especially in enterprise environment.

I wouldn't buy those myself, much rather looking for intel one, but thats just me...

[FragrantHead]

Thanks Quicklite, you've just floored me! I was expecting a lot head-scratching. Yours is the sort of well-informed reply I didn't dare hope for; first reply in this thread, no less.

[Quicklite]

Glad to help.

[Rochefort]

According to NotebookReview HERE the T400s is stuffed with a Samsung MMCRE28G8MXP (128 GB)

[moore101]

I have two T400s systems one was a demo unit with the ATT WWAN it has a MMCRE28GMXP. The second system is our new custom part number systems (first batch) and it has the Toshiba THNS128GG4BAAA. I can run some benchmarks on the drives. Does anyone have any recomendations for a good SSD benchmarking software (that is free).

[FragrantHead]

Thanks for the offer! There's a thread here with the sort of benchmarking tool that might be useful:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=304239

Particularly you should be looking for a tool that measures performance for different file sizes, like the above. It's mostly the small file performance that sorts the wood from the chaff.

I'm going to add something that must sound strange, namely that Quicklite has already satisfied my curiosity for the most part. Benchmarking SSDs is fraught with issues, such as intermittent stuttering (JMicron controller) and performance degradation over time. I'm not sure how to benchmark those, but having had a JMicron-based SSD, I know the issues are real. There are some excellent articles over at Anandtech and I'm inclined to believe his conclusion when he writes:

"Samsung makes the drives you get if you order a Lenovo X300. In fact, if you're buying any major OEM system with an SSD in it, Samsung makes that drive. It's just too bad that those drives aren’t very good. Now to be fair to Samsung, this isn’t JMicron-terrible performance. It’s just not worth the money performance. Don't ever opt for the SSD upgrade from any of these OEMs if you've got the option of buying your own Indilinx or Intel drive and swapping it in there."

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdo ... =3631&p=19

[moore101]

Yea I saw that SSD comparison article and man was it looong. Here are my results using ATTO Disk benchmark:

Toshiba SSD:
img]http://i70.photobucket.com/albums/i88/l ... ibaSSD.jpg[/img]

Samsung SSD:
img]http://i70.photobucket.com/albums/i88/l ... ungSSD.jpg[/img]


It looks like the Toshiba is slightly faster but I am not a expert on benchmarking by any means. Also I know there are a ton of tools available for benchmarking, but I have almost no free time at work to "play" so don't complain that I didn't run 10 other utilities.

[jiantbrane]

Am I right in thinking that even the less desirable of the SSD's will leave 7200-rpm HDD's in the dust, both in speed and reliability?

[marcc]

I recently ordered 2 thinkpads (from 2 different suppliers, hard to find at times....) both 2808-CZU's (listed in the TABOOK as coming with 80GB drives... hoping for Intels...). Ended up being 128GB drives , one a Toshiba and the other a Samsung.

A friend benched both drives with his "standard" methods (not sure what he uses) and found the Toshiba to be a bit quicker than the Samsung... and both held their ground very nicely compared to the Intel X25's ... of course, all 3 blew even the "mighty" VRaptors out of the water, so you're getting a fast drive no matter what

I kept the Toshiba for myself... never had such a fast drive... its ridiculous

~marc

[moore101]

Did the benchmark pictures get removed? Is this site still stuck in 1998 and not allowing pictures without warning in the subject? The pictures were 63KB each, come on guys you need to update your TOS, modem users are the very small minority in 2009.....

Admin message: Mobile connectivity is very much on the increase and excessive image size is a very real issue for mobile device users.

[jiantbrane]

Anyone know what's going into the T400 (not s) at this point?

[FragrantHead]

Am I right in thinking that even the less desirable of the SSD's will leave 7200-rpm HDD's in the dust, both in speed and reliability?

I wish I could give you a straight answer on that, I really do. Indeed, your question crystallizes why I started this thread. If you're talking about the current SSDs in Thinkpads, it looks like the answer is "Yes". I have no experience to back this up, but am going by marcc's and moore101's posts. On the other hand, if you're talking about SSDs in general then the answer is a resounding "No", bearing in mind that we're talking about the "less desirable" (often older) SSDs as you put it.

I'm piecing this together from several sources. For a start there is my personal experience with an original OCZ Core series drive, which is based on the original revision of the infamous J-Micron controller. Like the reviews say this will stall in certain situations, e.g. on small file writes or possibly when intermixing a lot of small reads and writes. In practice this meant that, while Windows boot time was improved, as soon as the anti-virus update hit, my machine would stall and become completely unresponsive for 10 seconds, including the mouse. Such simply does not happen with a conventional hard drive and is completely unacceptable in my book. I used that SSD only for light duty as the boot drive in my multimedia machine and can't comment what the experience would be like in a laptop, but am sure the stalling wouldn't be limited to anti-virus updates. Needless to say these don't cause the same kind of stalling with either a conventional disk or better SSD, both of which I've used. The stalling is a known problem with the JMicron controller, confirmed by online reviews.

Even other SSDs that don't outright stall may offer worse than conventional HDD performance in certain usage scenarios. They typically have a problem with random small-file writes, as reviewed on this page:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdo ... =3531&p=25

The Samsung-based drives (Samsung SLC, OCZ Summit) only offer 1/2 to 1/3rd the performance of the conventional drives in the test. My attention was first drawn to this after reading a forum post 2 or 3 years ago by a software developer who used an SSD in his machine. During software development a compiler typically writes lots of small files and his (then available) SSD was reportedly 3 times slower at this task than a conventional disk. If that sounds bad, have a look at the JMicron results in the above test. 50 times slower than a conventional disk! This is a worst-case scenario, but still. Incidentally these results refer to the 'B' revision and RAID-0 implementation thereof respectively. JMicron, through OCZ and others, have released a string of enhanced versions of their controller, but by all accounts these have merely been workarounds for a fairly abysmal problem, not a redesign. The marketing push for them has been quite misleading too. For example some are touted as offering an internal RAID-0 architecture, but this only sounds good if you don't know that Samsung and Intel use an 8-way and 10-way implementation internally without making a big fuss about it, e.g. they are much more advanced than a 2-way RAID.

I'm a bit perplexed at the good small-file results in this thread, but must confess that I simply recommended the first benchmark I came across. It's one I've seen used in some reviews, but it might not be the best to highlight the issues with SSDs. Going over Anand's review again, I noticed he used IOMeter with some of his own custom scripts, which appears to give radically different results. Perhaps ATTO, even though using small files, does not cause random but sequential activity?

The second problem with SSDs is performance degradation over time. Some of them will offer their maximum speed only until their full capacity has been written once. Some may degrade further after that. This is partly an operating system-related problem. With conventional hard disks you simply overwrite any unused space when you save a file. With SSDs that space must be erased first, which is a tricky operation for the SSD controller to manage, because erasing can only be done in bulk for relatively large blocks at a time. However the very first time you use an SSD, it knows it's full capacity was completely erased at the factory and it can forego erasing it, until you've filled it to capacity or made file updates that add up to the capacity of the drive. This is actually quite sneaky as the drive will present it's best side to an uninformed reviewer fresh out of the factory, but may subsequently slow down forever after. On the other hand, if the operating system could tell the drive about files that have been deleted, the drive could save itself some work and come closer to it's fresh out-of-the-factory performance again. I believe the standards that are needed for this, the so-called TRIM command, are only just being laid down now though. It may or may not find it's way into Vista / Windows 7.

As to reliability, the jury is out on that. It seems intuitive that SSDs must be more shock-resistant than conventional disks. I believe the potential problem with SSDs lies elsewhere, namely their limited write-endurance. Individual flash cells can only be written to reliably so many times, about 10,000 times ballpark for MLC. SSD controllers are programmed to be smart about this and spread updates as evenly as possible across the full capacity of the SSD. I am not aware that this is something to be worried about as I believe or at least hope that manufacturers have done their homework, but to say that SSDs leave conventional hard drives in the dust may be taking it too far.

[dfumento]

I've been using the Intel X25-M since the beginning of May and it works really well. From what I have read, it is best to use the Intel product over even the stock products offered with Lenovo (e.g. Samsung, Toshiba) and I would recommend getting the Thinkpads with the cheapest HD and getting the Intel drive from Newegg or some other seller.

That said, when I try to save a file to a large directory sometimes it takes a couple of seconds to populate the save dialog box but otherwise these (Intel) drives are fantastic.