Page 1 of 1
[x240] battery drains after m.2 2242 ssd upgrade
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2019 1:40 pm
by whqdz
Hello
I notice a huge battery drains since i've added a
pcie-ssd m.2 sata ssd on my x240. It changes from 18hours battery life with both batteries at 100%, to 6h30 .
this model :
https://www.transcend-info.com/Products/No-766
Do you know if it's possible a pcie ssd drains battery so fast?
Re: [x240] battery drains after pcie ssd upgrade
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2019 2:11 pm
by RealBlackStuff
One of its key features:
Supports Device Sleep Mode (DevSleep) to prolong notebook battery life by intelligently shutting down SATA interface when not in use
Did you switch that off?
How many batteries do you have and how old are they?
Also, since version 6, power management is rather quirky.
E.g. when I start up my X230 with a freshly charged 6-cell battery, the program shows about 18 hours!
A few minutes later (without even touching the machine) it's down to ~6.5 hours, a little later ~3.5 hours, then back to ~5 hours which is about right I'd say.
Blame Lenovo and/or Micro$haft for not knowing what they are doing.
Re: [x240] battery drains after pcie ssd upgrade
Posted: Mon Mar 04, 2019 4:13 pm
by Thinkpad4by3
RealBlackStuff wrote: ↑Mon Mar 04, 2019 2:11 pm
Blame Lenovo and/or Micro$haft for not knowing what they are doing.
And they haven't for 25 years!
Re: [x240] battery drains after pcie ssd upgrade
Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2019 8:39 am
by whqdz
RealBlackStuff wrote: ↑Mon Mar 04, 2019 2:11 pm
One of its key features:
Supports Device Sleep Mode (DevSleep) to prolong notebook battery life by intelligently shutting down SATA interface when not in use
Did you switch that off?
How many batteries do you have and how old are they?
Also, since version 6, power management is rather quirky.
E.g. when I start up my X230 with a freshly charged 6-cell battery, the program shows about 18 hours!
A few minutes later (without even touching the machine) it's down to ~6.5 hours, a little later ~3.5 hours, then back to ~5 hours which is about right I'd say.
Blame Lenovo and/or Micro$haft for not knowing what they are doing.
Yeah I already took a look about every tweaks I could do from bios / system. 6-cell battery is less than a year old, brand new with 104% charge, and the internal 3-cell is 72% full charge, from 2015 (when the original seller bought the unit).
So, I just tried by removing the
pcie-ssd m.2 sata ssd from the x240 and the battery life became around the same as before : 16-17hours of browsing / vim. I'm really surprised since DevSleep is supported by haswell architecture and transcend is known to provide good energy efficient ssd. The bios is up-to-date.
I did a fresh re-install of my system last night, from A to Z, on a arch based system and with all the intel / tlp / powertop packages as before. I had the same results : bad battery life with the
pcie-ssd m.2 sata ssd. I also took a look at the different running process with top and it doesn't look like a hungry process issue.
Usually, I get 8 to 10hours of hard use : movie streaming, browsing with many tabs, downloading a lot. And 16-18hours with light browsing and editor/compiling (atom/sublime text or vim).
I think i'm going to keep the
pcie-ssd m.2 sata ssd for my next desktop upgrade with a motherboard that gets a m.2 2242 slot. I will instead buy a new ssd with a lot more storage for my x240.
Fail for Lenovo since i'm gonna wait years and years before buying a new x series thinkpad, I'm not currently upgrading my x240 just for fun
Re: [x240] battery drains after pcie ssd upgrade
Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2019 9:23 am
by dr_st
This is not really PCIe, is it? AFAIK, X240 does not support PCIe in the M.2 slot, only SATA. DevSleep would not be relevant for PCIe, only ASPM.
I understand that you are using the M.2 SSD in addition, not instead, of the main one? And that's when the battery life suffers? It's possible that there is a bug with DevSleep somewhere related to this specific slot.
Re: [x240] battery drains after pcie ssd upgrade
Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2019 10:00 am
by whqdz
dr_st wrote: ↑Tue Mar 05, 2019 9:23 am
This is not really PCIe, is it? AFAIK, X240 does not support PCIe in the M.2 slot, only SATA. DevSleep would not be relevant for PCIe, only ASPM.
I understand that you are using the M.2 SSD in addition, not instead, of the main one? And that's when the battery life suffers? It's possible that there is a bug with DevSleep somewhere related to this specific slot.
My bad excuse me i'm actually really tired. It's a M.2 sata and not a pcie. I'm going to edit on my previous posts.
Yes I was using it in addition of the main ssd (toshiba) and the battery suffers at this time. By saying it's possible there is a bug related to this specific slot, are you talking about an hardware issue? I didn't think about it since the unit is in a really nice state and I never had another issue with it.
Re: [x240] battery drains after pcie ssd upgrade
Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2019 1:09 pm
by dr_st
Hardware, firmware, BIOS, software - issues can be anywhere. The niceness of the unit and whether it suffers from other problems has nothing to do with it. I am not taking about something broken, but a design flaw / coding mistake.
Re: [x240] battery drains after pcie ssd upgrade
Posted: Wed Mar 06, 2019 7:03 am
by whqdz
It’s a contingency I haven’t ruled out, it could even be just a command line or a config file to edit, who knows. I will continue my research over the months, quitting to redo some tests, and if I have anything new I would not hesitate to keep up here.
Re: [x240] battery drains after pcie ssd upgrade
Posted: Wed Mar 06, 2019 7:53 am
by RealBlackStuff
X240 also has an option for a 3rd SSD (M.2 NGFF 2242, e.g. Transcend), via an adapter that goes under the front-battery.
Mostly used as a cache-drive, I guess.
Tried that the other day (with SSD formatted in NTFS), in someone else's X240s with W10-Pro/1809.
As a side-effect, a restart takes about 4-5 minutes!
(one more reason why I hate W10).
When I moved the SSD to the WWAN slot, no more restart problems.
Couldn't check any battery-life influence, because this W10 does NOT show battery-life! (one more reason why I hate W10).
Re: [x240] battery drains after pcie ssd upgrade
Posted: Wed Mar 06, 2019 8:45 am
by dr_st
whqdz wrote: ↑Wed Mar 06, 2019 7:03 am
It’s a contingency I haven’t ruled out, it could even be just a command line or a config file to edit, who knows. I will continue my research over the months, quitting to redo some tests, and if I have anything new I would not hesitate to keep up here.
It's not clear from your post which OS you have tried. You mentioned Arch Linux; have you tried Windows 8.1/10? This experiment might tell you if you are looking into an OS/driver issue or hardware/BIOS.
Re: [x240] battery drains after m.2 2242 ssd upgrade
Posted: Thu Mar 07, 2019 7:54 am
by whqdz
Unfortunately I no longer have any machine on windows that can accept this type of ssd. I have planned an upgrade of my only desktop windows 8 to next year, with a MoBo that has a m.2 slot, and even if it is possible to do energy consumption tests in order to know if it is not the ssd that is wrong, it will, I think, not be relevant enough in comparison to a laptop with a low-consumption processor of the same type as the Haswell that is in the x240.
I’m about to receive a new LCD for my x240. I will first document the entire process and do some tests to see the difference of battery consumption between touch 720p/ non-touch 1080p since I don't have too much time right now.
Subsequently, I will try again tests with the ssd m.2., it could be anything, hardware of software. At the same time I continue my research and as soon as I find something interesting I will keep up to date.
RBS: I really love the stability of windows 8 on a multimedia desktop machine, it's far far away from Windows 7 or even XP. But according to my requirements, linux remains what I prefer to work, both on the ergonomic side and on the material support side. On the other hand for the PAO and graphics I prefer the macOS environment. I hate how micro$oft forces the purchase of a windows 10 license to use a Kaby lake architecture.