W701/W701ds Compact Flash performance

[lvit]

Could somebody comment on performance of CF system expansion slot on W701. I ordered my W701ds recently with the following option Compact Flash (PCIe) + Express Card(34mm) and then found out that the CF reader is extremely slow on W700. Does anybody know, if it the same part number on W700 and W701? I'm trying to find it out from my Lenovo sales rep. I would greatly appreciate any comments on this subject.

System expansion slots available on W701/W701ds:

Express Card(54mm) + Express Card(34mm)
Smart Card + Express Card(34mm) [add $10.00]
Compact Flash (PCIe) + Express Card(34mm) [add $10.00]

[AMATX]

Ivit, not trying to chase all of your posts but I had a minute, went here:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 70561.html

Judging by the W700/W701 title, there's probably many parts in common, which one would expect.

The way to read this doc is to look at the exploded diagram/pic, find the part in which you're interested, and then look below under the part number to get the part's specs. You're interested in part # 28. Note that #28 has three sections, each one dealing with one of the port combo units.

Interesting that the actual part number for your 34mm+CF unit is different between the W700 and W701. Hard to tell what that means without physically examining each part in person. Could be exactly the same part with different stock numbers to differentiate between W700/W701 for inventory tracking(and perhaps allow for higher pricing on the more current W701 units).

Any rate, you can go here:

http://thinkpadonline.com/

and scope out part numbers and some approximate pricing. This is where I got the ~$150 price on the 34mm+54mm unit I'm considering buying for my W700. They also sell on ebay.

You might also call the Lenovo service center and talk to the fixit people to see if they can find out any info on the 34mm+CF unit design change(s), if any.

And, lastly(!), it -is- possible that the CF unit could work for your purposes, depending upon whether or not you need to do a lot of fast I/O to/from it. If used mainly for auxiliary storage, speed may not matter much; if for lots of photography usage, moving pics to/from, then you'd want some serious speed. Just depends. In my case, I wanted to use the CF for temp storage with an app I run that would write a lot of small files to it. Bummer for me, so I had to buy the USB CF reader I mentioned in the other post. CF reads faster than it writes, so take that into account also.

Hope that helps...

[lvit]

Ivit, not trying to chase all of your posts but I had a minute, went here:

Actually, I greatly appreciate your help AMATX. I'm waiting for some additional info from my sales rep. I hope they will be able to answer my questions.

I'll probably take my chances and leave my order the way it is unless Lenovo rep. will tell me that W701 uses exactly the same CF unit as on W700. As you pointed out, I might find the performance of CF on W701ds acceptable. Photography is my hobby, so it's not that critical, unless transfer rate is absolutely terrible. I'm surprised to learn that such an expensive piece of hardware as W700 designed for professionals (including professional photographers) suffers from any kind of problem with CF. I would expect it to be the leader and be able to support latest Comact Flash revisions (UDMA 133 ).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompactFlash

Also, the fact that part numbers for W700 and W701 are different could be promising. Then again, who knows.

[AMATX]

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what Lenovo comes back with to you on this one.

I don't recall where I found the info I referenced, but it was probably through googling the W700 and/or CF. I do recall finding several websites with some early W700 reviews. In general, they mentioned substandard specs that didn't mean much to me(way outside my area). However, they all agreed that performance was poor and that Lenovo either really dropped the ball or was on the cheap with this gizmo.

Do a search and you'll probably find the same stuff I did. And, some of the reviewers were photog types like you, so their blurbs will mean much more to you than it did to me.

** You -might- wanna look around for early reviews of the W701 to see if any reviewers have compared the CF. Maybe Lenovo did the right thing; these guys would certainly be in a position to notice

I did a quick check on my app, which cuts 220k jpegs, one/second. The CF is noticeably slower than my alternate method of using a Ram drive(no surprise). It slows the app down to cutting about 40 pics/minute, vs. 60/minute that the app is trying to do. I don't know how well this translates into say, 10Meg camera pics, but if you're a very active photographer, I gotta figure this'll get old waiting, twiddling your thumbs. Less strenuous usage may be ok...

As an additional slow speed aux storage slot, CF has some possibilities. Not the cheapest way, but kinda handy to stor xGig of stuff without getting into the hard drives any. Non-intrusive, too.

[QFoam]

Interesting.

I have a Nikon D90 digital SLR, which uses SD cards instead of compact flash cards, and I use the Sandisk 30 MB/sec SD cards with that. I did a quick and dirty test of plugging one of these cards into the W700's 7-in-1 card reader, and got about 10.6 MB/sec while downloading 182 MB of photos. That would equate to about 1 minute 36 seconds per gigabyte. Testing with a full card (8GB in this case) would probably yield a more accurate transfer rate measurement. I don't have the compact flash reader option on my W700, just the standard 7-in-1 card reader.

So I'm not talking about compact flash memory cards in this case, but instead SD memory cards. My measurements are just another point of reference.

Here's one article about the compact flash issue on the W700, but I would probably have tested it by downloading photos from the card, instead of their approach of using a hard drive testing program. Downloading photos would be more of a real-world test.

Anyway, they achieved 30 MB/sec with an external SanDisk USB 2.0 compact flash reader and a 30 MB/sec compact flash Sandisk card, and only 1.2 MB/sec using the compact flash reader option built into the W700. I don't notice a date on that article, but it's possible that this is influenced to some extent by driver issues.

And for anyone who's interested, here's an article on compact flash in general.

If this is indeed a problem on the W701, and if I needed support for compact flash, then I'd probably order the machine without the compact flash reader option and instead install an expresscard compact flash reader such as:

http://www.amazon.com/Expresscard-Adapt ... B001DQLPHM

or use an external USB compact flash reader (note that not all USB compact flash readers are created equal).

ExpressCard 2.0 should have the same transfer rate limits as a PCIe 2.0 mini-card slot of 250 MB/sec (250 MB/sec for input, and 250 MB/sec for output, which is often stated as a total limit of 500 MB/sec). But note that some expresscards that you buy to plug into your expresscard slot use the slower USB 2.0 interface available within the expresscard connector, instead of using PCIe, so they're instead constrained by the USB 2.0 transfer-rate limit of 60 MB/sec (note that the above card uses PCIe).

Anyway, this is one more data point for people trying to figure all of this out.

[AMATX]

Nice info, QFoam, jives with what I recall reading...BIG diff, using the CF slot.

And, I came to the same conclusion you did about using an Expresscard slot. With the W700/W701, one can order the two slot combo of 34mm+54mm, and use a second 34mm card in the 54mm(54mm accommodates both widths). Next time, I'll order both slots as Expresscard. And, as previously mentioned, I'll probably replace my combo slot unit(34mm+CF) with a 34mm+54mm unit. BUT, $other$ items are ahead of that one...

Would still like info on the W701 CF performance, but I don't have time right now to dig into that.

[lvit]

Unfortunately, there's enough info on the Internet about this problem in early W700/W700ds, but nothing about CF in W701/W701ds:

Quote from some article on the web:

A usable CompactFlash slot Lenovo offers several different expansion slot configurations for the W700, including one made up of separate ExpressCard 34 and CompactFlash slots. This is the configuration in our W700 loaner, and as we, as well as photographers who purchased the machine discovered, the CompactFlash slot is glacially slow, topping out in card-to-computer transfers at just over 1MB/s while making the computer feel sluggish at the same time.

Lenovo, says Williams, has now fixed the CompactFlash slot, by changing the card reader circuitry inside the machine. It utilizes a USB 2.0 connection internally, and Lenovo isn't quoting specific performance numbers for it, but if it's fixed and is a decent implementation of a USB 2.0 card reader and it supports the UDMA data timing protocol of newer CompactFlash cards, then it should offer transfer rates upwards of 20MB/s at least (this is our ballpark guess - we hope to test and include actual performance numbers for the revamped W700's CompactFlash slot in the CF/SD Performance Database in the near future).

Because correcting the CompactFlash slot's speed problem meant changing the reader hardware, existing W700 computers with slow CompactFlash slots can't be sped up through a software update or similar user-loadable correction, says Williams.

Link to an article

Link to a similar thread on another forum

[chrisaix]

Hi all,

Windoze 7 Hardware Manager shows the build in Compact Flash Reader Device as:
JMCR CF SCSI Disk Device

I've done some measuremts
* USB CF-card reader: HAMA USB 2.0 Card Reader 35 in 1 [V3] (it's a blue external device) - see also http://www.hjreggel.de/cardspeed/speed-readers.html
* one big video file (vdr): 941,160 k
* multiple pictures (jpeg & nef, 297 files in one directory) 1,129,844 k
* Windoze 7 64Bit (caching enabled vs. disbled)
* SanDisk Extreme IV, 8GB, FAT32
* times are are measured by hand - so 1s variance is possible

Results:

Code: Select all

               USB [s]           USB   CF CARD Reader        CF CARD Reader
                        wo cache [s]          W701 [s]  W701 (wo cache) [s]
Pics write         68            68                36                    46
Pics read          43            47                38                    32
Video write        49            49                19                    32
Video read         33            32                24                    25
                                                                           
             [kByte/s]     [kByte/s]         [kByte/s]             [kByte/s]
Pics write     16,615        16,615            31,385                24,562
Pics read      26,275        24,039            29,733                35,308
Video write    19,207        19,207            49,535                29,411
Video read     28,520        29,411            39,215                37,646

                 MB/s          MB/s              MB/s                  MB/s
Pics write      16.23         16.23             30.65                 23.99
Pics read       25.66         23.48             29.04                 34.48
Video write     18.76         18.76             48.37                 28.72
Video read      27.85         28.72             38.30                 36.76

So, the build in CF Card Reader is much faster than the USB Reader (which has the reputation to be one of the faster devices)

BTW: The Hardware Maintenance Manual says, the the FRUs (Parts) are different.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-70385 [43y9442_06.pdf]

---
edit 2010-06-11:
A nice Overview on Cardreaders can be found at http://www.hjreggel.de/cardspeed/speed-readers.html. On that page you will also find card measurements.

[lvit]

Thanks a million chrisaix. This is the data I was looking for. So it appears that Lenovo actually made some changes to CF module and/or firmware.

[QFoam]

Excellent work, Chrisaix! Interesting that it shows up as a SCSI device.