Any Reasonbly Good Older SSDs?

[emeraldgirl08]

Hi all. I had planned on doing this for some time now and I have decided to start looking. I once had an SSD but hard times forced me to sell it. I miss the speeds of opening up programs as well as how quiet an SSD is. What I would like to purchase is (1) SSD for the generation of ThinkPads in my sig. Most likely the SSD would go in the x201tablet as I primarily use that out-and-about. IIRC the x200 non-tablet and x200tablet both natively operate up to SATA II speeds. I know my T400 did and the T500 should as well since they are cohorts of the 4 series Intel generation (?). I would like to keep price to a minimum. All my window installs with programs I normally use plus updates have been averaging ~35 gb on a platter drive therefore I do not need > 80gb. Music is always placed on my SDHC cards and when I do watch a video or some media clip I usually place them on a USB flash drive.

Thanks

[ajkula66]

The key question is: what are you looking to spend?

This would be my pick:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148745

[emeraldgirl08]

That is a very attractive price!

Will keep this one in mind. Thanks!

[Temetka]

$80 for a 128GB is a great price.


Hmm...

[ZaZ]

IIRC the x200 non-tablet and x200tablet both natively operate up to SATA II speeds.

People often point to the throughput of a SSD as a benchmark for performance, but it's really the latency - how fast data can be found and read, that makes SSDs so fast. Since the latency for all drives is like.1ms, all SSDs are fast, at least in my experience. Unless you're doing something that puts a heavy load on the controller like copy and pasting files, but typical usage doesn't do this.

If you're really looking to pay the less, I'd troll eBay to see if you can get something there used from a good brand like Intel, Crucial, Kingston, OCZ, etc. I've seen 80GB Intel G2 drives go sub $40, but some patience would be required to get those deals. Used is also a more risky proposition because there's no warranty, but that's the trade-off you make for paying less.

[A31]

You can take it from me, the M4 is a fabulous drive. I've used a lot of SSDs now (M4s, Vertex 4s, SanDisk Extremes etc etc) and the M4 was definitely one of the better drives of its time. They were rock solid, fast and the firmware was easy to update. Very good drives. It is true that I owned one and it died, but Crucial were great at sending me a free replacement which I am still using in one of my machines and it's working great.

You'll only see its true potential if you use SATA 6GB/s. I don't know if your laptop has 6GB/s support or not. If not, you may as well just get a SATA 3GB/s SSD such as the OCZ Vertex 2. Those were pretty good drives back in the day IIRC. Samsung also made some decent SATA 3GB/s drives.

[emeraldgirl08]

Thanks for the replies all. I picked up an Intel X-25M 80gb for $55 on fleabay. The seller has a 100% rating with ~6k sales so I am hoping this will turn out ok! Yes that Crucial was very tempting...but I barely squeezed the Intel in with the budget I have. I have not done an SSD install since 2011 so I this will definitely be a re-learning experience

[Temetka]

That is a very nice price.

I'd grab one, but seeing as my X61T only has 1 slot for HD's I need something with more space.

But please let us know how it works out for you.

[ajkula66]

That is a very nice price.

I'd grab one, but seeing as my X61T only has 1 slot for HD's I need something with more space.

How much space do you need? There are some interesting options out there, but without knowing your specific requirements, I'm hesitant to say anything...

As for the old(er) Intel SSDs...I was lucky enough to pick up a sealed NOS X-25E last year. It's 32GB only, but holds the OS (W7 Pro 32), MS Office 2007 and a couple of other essential programs on my "signature" T43pSF...I love that drive. Sure it's only SATA II but the machine is SATA I, so who cares...and nothing beats a SLC drive in my book...

[emeraldgirl08]

That is a very nice price.

I'd grab one, but seeing as my X61T only has 1 slot for HD's I need something with more space.

But please let us know how it works out for you.

I will. I probably will not receive it until Saturday (if I am lucky) or until Monday. I plan on flashing the latest firmware first if it has not been done yet. After that a clean install with updates yadda yadda yadda I should have it up and running by Monday just in time for classes. I really like the form factor of my x200tablet with a 4-cell battery now. It is cute lol. Now that an SSD will be present the tablet should hold me over until I save up for an X220

[ZaZ]

Having owned both the X200t and X220, there's not much of a difference, other than the mSATA SSD.

[Temetka]

@Ajkulla66

Other than my external HD (which it 1.5TB), I carry all my music, video's, pics and other digital detritus with me. So If I want to do that, I am going to need 250GB just for my data, let alone the OS, programs, space for Linux, and some breathing room. So ideally 500GB. Which is what I am using now.

That being said I really, really want an SSD. So I could move the non-essential but nice to have items to my external HD. Which would then make a 256GB SSD a very nice alternative. If I can find a decently fast one from a reputable manufacturer that will last atleast 3 years of heavy OS swaps, heavy file transfer and my rough lifestyle for less than $150 - I will be all over it.

[emeraldgirl08]

Not sure what I did wrong when I installed W7 on the SSD. My old Patriot Torqx that I had in the past used to score in the 7's on Windows Experience Index. I know that I should not put much stock in scores from WEI but a 5.9 for the Intel X-25M is unimpressive. I even updated the firmware before installing W7. My programs are very few and I installed basic Lenovo programs such as the power manager, hotkeys, intel chipset support, intel integrated graphics driver, communications utility, and bluetooth drivers. I do notice that when I click on a program such as FF there is a delay then it will finally open the program. What is irritating is that a 5.9 is the same score that I get with my old platter drive

I also disabled prefetch, indexing, superfetch, and defrag (automatically was disabled from the start). I did not want to install Intel Toolbox but I was curious as to what its optimizer would suggest. Well it really did not find anything wrong and shows that my drive is in the green (good).

Any ideas?

[ajkula66]

Did you run anything along the lines of HD Tune and/or Crystal Disk Mark to check the performance stats out of WEI?

I'll agree that 5.9 sounds low...that's a score for a good spinning drive, not SSD.

[emeraldgirl08]

Hi George. I just downloaded Crystal Mark 3.0.2 x64 and gave it a run.

My scores @ 5 test runs X 1000MB X C:35% (25/70gb)

- Sequential Read (253.2) Write (77.47)
- 512k Read (198.4) Write (38.26)
- 4K Read (15.68) Write (34.42)
- 4k/QD32 Read (131.6) Write (24.87)

I ran the test with AC and set power manager to maximum performance.

[ajkula66]

Off the top of my head, those "write" figures seem fairly low...reads are fine.

[emeraldgirl08]

Hmmm.. I will check back later and hopefully someone who may have some experience with this model of SSD might chime in. Thanks for answering George!

[ajkula66]

OK, your "write" figures are definitely low.

X-25E on my modded T43p which is SATA I with no AHCI...writes are: 119.3/87.65/31.98/56.19

Your "read" values are *significantly* better than mine, which is to be expected.

[ZaZ]

Did you use the Intel Rapid driver?

[mikemex]

I use Samsung first generation 64GB SLC drives in all my machines (even my desktop) as boot / OS drives, the ones that came with the X300s. I know it's not that fast compared to what's available today but I was using XP at the time and it was the only drive that worked well there (it does its own garbage collection on NTFS without TRIM). Also, I feel better having an SLC drive than an MLC one. I had two identical Samsung drives except for the type of chips and the MLC degrades much faster. By the time I sold the X300 it was installed in to my sister it had around 10% wear from the report of CrystalDiskInfo. The SLC, only 1%. These drives now have like 6-7 years on them and still rock solid. The guy who sold me the X300 had a dead SLC drive, though, so maybe it's time to do a full backup just in case...

Speed... well, I'd say it's fast enough but can't really tell the difference since all my machines now have SSDs.Having 300 tabs open in 64 bit Firefox (Waterfox) is decent performance, right? You're right: access time is the #1 benefit of having an SSD.

In the T420 and X220 I installed a secondary mSATA SSD, 128GB. Samsung, I don't remember which model. It's much faster than the main drive but since it's SLC I try to keep writes low on it so I keep it mostly for storage.

Probably, the main reason I installed the SSDs was vibration resistance. I once dropped a laptop and the drive broke and lost all data on it. I'm pretty sure most SSDs will survive that. Also, I like the low noise levels, I tend to work at night and it's barely audible.

Having owned both the X200t and X220, there's not much of a difference, other than the mSATA SSD.

I still have my X200 and I struggle to find anything I can do on the X220 that I can't on the X200. Everything in the X200 is comparable to more modern models: it's got a 64 bit processor, it supports 8GB of RAM, has integrated antenas for WWAN, webcam, etc. I'm selling it but more than once I've thought that, unless I get what I want for it, I'll definitely keep it.

But the X220 has some real benefits: battery life for example. Realistic expectation for the X200 is around 4.5 hours. The X220 lasts easily 6. My X200 has an LCD display that is starting to turn yellow while the screen on the X220 is LED and unlikely to lose brightness any time soon. And finally, everything on the X220 is much faster, specially the graphics. I can play some games on the X220 while gaming on the X200 is really not possible unless you're running a very old game.

[emeraldgirl08]

Did you use the Intel Rapid driver?

I forgot to mention that I had tried to install the Intel Rapid Driver directly from Intel as well but apparently the program does not support Intel 4 series chipset- it would not install. No support for the Intel 4 series chipsets seems to be verified by this 'read me' file from Intel. If you scroll down a bit you will notice that the Intel 4 series chipset support is not on the support. I did notice if I enter my model type into Lenovo Support to get my list of drivers and if I scroll down to the sub-header 'Storage' that there is an Intel Matrix Storage driver however I am not sure if that is what I need

I feel a secure erase followed by a clean install might be the only alternative at this point. If this yields the same results I may have to install W8 as a last resort on the SSD (as much as I do not want to) and see how that goes

[ajkula66]

What is the SATA mode set to in BIOS?

[emeraldgirl08]

I made sure it was set to AHCI from the get-go. Really wish this was a more plug-and-play type setup. I have school work that I must tend to which restricts time I can spend working on this issue. Backtracking I cannot think of any thing that I have done that would cause a bottleneck on the SSD. I updated the firmware via bootable CD (following instructions from Intel) and finally installed W7.

I will set aside some time this coming weekend and see what a fresh install does.

[emeraldgirl08]

Update:

Hi peeps. I actually got fed up with the state of the SSD and decided to issue an hdparm command to initiate a secure erase and start over. I then reinstalled W7 and installed only the Intel graphics driver, power manager, and then ran the WEI just to see if the platter-drive equivalent score would surface again. This time it displayed 7.8. I knew that something was wrong from the beginning! I have since updated Windows and added programs I use consistently . WEI still shows a 7.8 score for the hard drive. Much much better

I also left 20% of my drive as unallocated at the suggestion of others. Not sure exactly what did it but the scores look better and I feel validated. I knew something was amiss when an SSD is reporting such a low score for WEI and low scores for Crystal Mark as well. Just glad to get things back on track now and am happy with the performance the SSD so far

[Temetka]

I am glad you got it sorted out.

A score of 5.9 is what I usally get with my WD Scorpio black edition drives. The fast 7,200RPM models with a large cache.

I finally decided that I can live with nothing smaller than 320GB for an SSD (or any HD for that matter). I haven't been able to find a decent SSD that meets my space and price requirements. I don't care if the thing loads windows in 2 seconds. If it's not 320GB or greater and less than $200, then it's not in my system. I don't mind waiting a whopping 2 seconds for Firefox to load. On my X61T, FF loads in 2.3 seconds (I timed it). Ya know what? That's really fast.

I come from the days when hard drives were $1,000 upgrades for a 40MB Connor MFM or RLL drive. So having one that loads in this quick of time is stupendously amazingly wonderous wonderfulness.