Got my X25-m 80GB (PIC)

[khtse]

I got my Intel X25-m SSD today and installed it on my X61. I clean installed Vista 64 bit on it without problem. Speed improvement is noticeable (my previous drive is Hitachi 7k200, and it is completely silent. It doesn't have random pauses people experienced with other MLC SSD drive and seems to handle multi-tasking very good. In fact, I was so impatient that I run Lenovo System update, Windows update, and installed a few other application simultaneously, but my windows didn't freeze up.

However, HD Tach shows that the sequential read speed is around 110MB/s (a very flat curve with little variation), withd a burst speed of 126.5MB/s. Random access is 0.1ms.

The sequential read speed of 110MB/s, while much faster than typical notebook harddrive, seems pretty slow for this drive. Reviews and forum posts all report that they have no problem reproducing the announced read speed of 250MB/s
(example: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/788/4/). Any idea why? Do I have to set anything to optimize the drive? Needless to say, I have installed all the updates and latest drivers.

[aaa]

Sounds like it is not using SATA2. I got the idea that IBM disabled it to save power, but I have no idea if that is true or not.

[jketzetera]

I got my Intel X25-m SSD today and installed it on my X61. I clean installed Vista 64 bit on it without problem. Speed improvement is noticeable (my previous drive is Hitachi 7k200, and it is completely silent. It doesn't have random pauses people experienced with other MLC SSD drive and seems to handle multi-tasking very good. In fact, I was so impatient that I run Lenovo System update, Windows update, and installed a few other application simultaneously, but my windows didn't freeze up.

However, HD Tach shows that the sequential read speed is around 110MB/s (a very flat curve with little variation), withd a burst speed of 126.5MB/s. Random access is 0.1ms.

The sequential read speed of 110MB/s, while much faster than typical notebook harddrive, seems pretty slow for this drive. Reviews and forum posts all report that they have no problem reproducing the announced read speed of 250MB/s
(example: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/788/4/). Any idea why? Do I have to set anything to optimize the drive? Needless to say, I have installed all the updates and latest drivers.

As long as you get very good random write and random read performance, the increases in sequential read speed beyond 110MB/s is going to do little to increase the responsiveness of your system in all but some very very specialized scenarios.

If I were you, I would spend my energy on making sure that the random read and write performance of the drive is in accordance with the specs.

I myself am waiting for the 1.8" 64GB Samsung SSD with the Lenovo 2.5" adapter to plug into my X60s (crossing my fingers that it will be compatible).

[jlingo]

I experienced freezes in the past few days with Intel SSD on my system.

In my case, when I was typing out my email using Outlook 2007 with Internet Explorer 7 on. My computer would all a sudden froze with an hour glass on the screen. Nothing operable except for the mouse. OMG at first you would freak out because you thought you would lose your email you just typed. The harddrive light indicator was also flashing brightly heavily. You wouldn't be able to do anything anymore with your computer for about 5 minutes and finally everything would return back to normal.

It's very annoying though. Currently, I already turned off prefetch and superfetch features within Vista as being recommended on
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ad.php?t=43525

I hope this problem resolves. Surely there is a problem with Outlook 2007 and SSD because I have seen my Outlook 2007 crashed(Non responding) few times in a day because when I re-opened my outlook, it would warn me that outlook was not closed properly and it would then undergo Data file check in progress with lower right corner little gear symbols.

Another thing that I considered to be a big problem when I was downloading a file from a website at 15KB/sec 50Mb File and my computer kept on frozen, while I was also browsing at the same time. So it was like 5minutes ok followed by 5minutes frozed, 5minutes ok, and 5 minutes frozen. God, that was annoying, until I had to cancel the downloading. Outlook and Opera were also in the open state not sure if this would affect dramatically.

Other than that, I haven't encountered any other problems(Finger crossed). Doing IM conversation has also been flawlessly. No stuttering no lagging.

"Are you running a computer that has a Solid State Drive (SSD)?
If you are running Outlook 2007 on a computer that has a solid state drive (SSD), you may experience frequent pauses when you perform typical operations in Outlook. The Outlook product team is aware of this issue and is investigating solutions for a future release.

If your computer is running on a computer that has both an SSD and a non-SSD (rotational) hard disk, you can reduce the frequency of the pauses by moving the .ost file or the .pst files to the non-SSD drive. For more information about how to move your Outlook Data Files, see the following article, "Introduction to Outlook data files," on the Office Online Web site: :
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlo ... 99831033#2 (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlo ... 99831033#2)
"

[khtse]

That is strange, as I have yet ran into any freezing/shuttering issue with my Intel SSD.

For reference, I run Vista 64, with 4GB of memory. I have not tried Outlook 2007 on it since I am still using Office 2003, and Outlook 2003 runs fine on it. For browser, I use Google Chrome mostly these days, but from time to time I go back to IE7 when some site doesn't work well with Chrome.

I haven't turned off any Vista feature beside User Account Control... btw, how to turn off auto defrag in Vista?

[hart22]

erik mentioned in another thread that the X61 has a hard drive interface bandwith limitation that seems to limit the maximum sequential read speed to around ~110-120 MB/s. Perhaps this could be the culprit?

[jlingo]

That is strange, as I have yet ran into any freezing/shuttering issue with my Intel SSD.

For reference, I run Vista 64, with 4GB of memory. I have not tried Outlook 2007 on it since I am still using Office 2003, and Outlook 2003 runs fine on it. For browser, I use Google Chrome mostly these days, but from time to time I go back to IE7 when some site doesn't work well with Chrome.

I haven't turned off any Vista feature beside User Account Control... btw, how to turn off auto defrag in Vista?

I'm not sure if Vista 64 would make a difference. I'm still testing right now whether Outlook 2007 is really the culprit. Therefore I try to close off my outlook whenever I don't check my email.

I have left prefetch and superprefetch on because I noticed that loss of snappiness without them on. I also stop using Internet Explorer 7, just in case IE7 might be causing problem as well. Therefore I'm sticking with Opera in the mean time.

Apart from that, I haven't really tried any other tweaks recommended by ocztechnology website.

I will see if I experienced any new things for better or worst the next few days.

[erik]

khtse - if you want, ship me your SSD and i'll test its performance in my thinkstation D10 using both the intel and LSI bus controllers.

the limitation here is definitely your X61.   however, considering the fact that your SSD is markedly faster than a hard drive, i wouldn't be concerned with only having approximately 110 MB/sec max transfer.

my samsung SLC SSD runs at around 98 MB/sec and is fast as heck.   i'm completely happy with its performance, especially since it complements the 1.8GHz LV processor.

[Switchcorp]

It comes from the southbridge of the X61 !

In a Belgian forum (TT-hardware) Pascal has tested a X25 in a T61P and on a P5Q. On his T61P the speed was limited to 100 mo/s (and it was over 200 mo/s on the P5Q).

[Switchcorp]

from : http://www.tt-hardware.com/modules.php? ... &sid=12088

[khtse]

khtse - if you want, ship me your SSD and i'll test its performance in my thinkstation D10 using both the intel and LSI bus controllers.

the limitation here is definitely your X61.   however, considering the fact that your SSD is markedly faster than a hard drive, i wouldn't be concerned with only having approximately 110 MB/sec max transfer.

my samsung SLC SSD runs at around 98 MB/sec and is fast as heck.   i'm completely happy with its performance, especially since it complements the 1.8GHz LV processor.

Thanks for the offer, but since my SSD is working happily in my X61, I will just leave it that way.

After using my SSD for more than a week, I have noticed an advantage that is not being mentioned. From time to time I would like to set everything on my X61 to lowest/slowest (except the monitor... which is already not very bright to start with) to save power and reduce heat. But this couldn't be sustained for long in the past due to the fact that it would also reduce the speed of my harddrive and made my X61 feeling slow. Now, with the SSD installed, it is still running slower when I lower everything, but the SSD speed is only lowered from the average of 110MB/s to the average of around 100MB/s, which is still very fast.

As a result, I can really run my X61 with everything turned down for the whole day, except possibly when I was watching a few video at the same time that the clocked down CPU becomes the bottleneck. As you can imagine, this really reduce a lot of heat and increased the battery life significantly.

As many reviews has pointed out, moving to SSD may not really increased the battery of your laptop literally. But they forgot to realize that it would change the way that you run your laptop, which can really improve battery life.

[Eckoman]

After using my SSD for more than a week, I have noticed an advantage that is not being mentioned. From time to time I would like to set everything on my X61 to lowest/slowest (except the monitor... which is already not very bright to start with) to save power and reduce heat.

Where do I find these settings exactly?

[hart22]

Where do I find these settings exactly?

ThinkVantage Power Manager (or Windows power management in the control panel, if the Lenovo software is not installed).

[dfumento]

It comes from the southbridge of the X61 !

In a Belgian forum (TT-hardware) Pascal has tested a X25 in a T61P and on a P5Q. On his T61P the speed was limited to 100 mo/s (and it was over 200 mo/s on the P5Q).

I wonder if the numbers will be any better on the newer Thinkpads: T400, T500, X200? Any ideas?

[jlingo]

I have formatted this afternoon, and now installing every single thing one by one.

So far it performs faster than before. I have been doing software installation through CDROM, Transfering data from one USB drive to this drive, Downloading windows update, Chatting msn, Posting notebookreview.com, essentially all the multitasking you can think off without any freezes. That's a progress with a formatting pain. A pain but I guess it's worth the pain as long as the problem completely solved.

For others who are using intel SSD and no freezing problem, do you guys still have prefetch, superfetch, and indexing on? I'm just wondering. At the moment I will leave only the indexing on, since I'm really hoping I could use this drive with indexing. it's very helpful with outlook.

Presently, it's a lot more responsive and snappier, therefore I will leave the prefetch and superfetch off. Thanks for everyone taking their time replying to my posts. I really appreciate this.

I will come back in a week touting about Intel SSD and my happiness. Hopefully my dream is realized!

[erik]

For others who are using intel SSD and no freezing problem, do you guys still have prefetch, superfetch, and indexing on? I'm just wondering.

i'm on server 2008 and all of that stuff is turned off by default, including defrag.   if you're using vista you'll want to turn off defrag right away, especially since MLC drives have much shorter lifespans than SLC.   there are instructions out there on turning off superfetch in vista, which i recommend, since the lack of the so-called "speed" services are what make 2008 so fast.   i think vista would be hated less if it came with this stuff factory-disabled.

on my X61s, photoshop CS4 extended is fully loaded in 4 seconds from the time i click on the shortcut button—and this is on a fresh boot without superfetch enabled.   i can't imagine anything making it load any faster.   it also loads in the same time on my thinkstation thanks to the 15K RPM SAS drives.   so, an SSD in a notebook is like having a 15K SAS drive.

[jlingo]

I just disabled prefetch and superfetch as I was actually experiencing stuttering which eventually lead to a total system freeze no matter how long I waited. Finally, I had to do a force shutdown. Actually I was fortunate enough for being able to replicate this problem twice at least it’s not random like the last time.

This happened when I had an excel opened, a word opened, outlook opened(Trying to reply email), Opera browser opened with many tabs, Foobar Player was opened doing song names inserting wirelessly from another computer.

Basically, I started to notice my mouse stuttering when I switched from one application to the next. During that time, I also experienced stuttering when moving from one email to the next especially those which contain HTML linked graphics. In the end, after a minute of stutters joy, it transformed into a complete freeze.

Problem seems solved by disabling prefetch and superfetch, haven’t seen any lagging or stuttering yet with similar amount of work being done. I guess when I was doing so much work at the same time, it was overkill for Intel X25-M.