Moving Up from A X200T to a T400s. Need Opinions And Info.

[epu]

While my X200T is pretty powerful and portable, I've been eyeing the T400s and wish that had been my choice (Purchased the X200T in Feb '09, the T400s came out later). My main reason for moving up is the ability to house a second HDD (instead of hawking around that bulky ultrabase) and STILL having an Expresscard slot (in otherwords, I can use 3 internal HDDs). The newer models have multitouch, but I'd be losing out on being able to lose my stylus.

Is this a good move? Is the T400s as lightweight? The two extra inches means that it has a larger footprint, and people that I am around will definitely know I'm carrying around a laptop. These laptops all sport Windows 7 64 Bit right, and allow for an XP Downgrade? I just want to make sure I'm making a great decision here. If I purchase the T400s, I will most likely be selling my X200T shortly thereafter.

[billp117]

Sounds like you have convinced yourself that the T400s better meets your needs. Although the X200t is somewhat smaller...how about just installing the biggest HD you can buy? You can get a 640GB HD for under $70. Would that solve your problem? The T400s is heavier, bigger, and eats power.

That said...if it were my $$ I would consider the T410s with the option for upgraded graphics. You get a faster processor and perhaps everything that would make you happy. I understand how handy it is to have an all in one laptop...but when you want long battery life and light weight...the X series is hard to beat. Let us know what you buy. Good luck.

[epu]

Thank you. The purpose of having two hard drives is that audio programs typically need to stream a lot of data, and one hard drive won't cut it. All audio and music samples have to reside on a second HDD. My other option is to purchase an eSata Expresscard and use that in my X200T, but a lot of them have problems in XP and W7.

[FragrantHead]

I own a T410s multi-touch. Until you mentioned that you truly need multiple disks, I would have told you it's a terrible move, but for what you want it for, it sounds reasonable, as you are looking for low weight as well.

(1) The X200T has a good screen. Tablets generally do, because of the need to have wide viewing angles, which means they use a better screen technology. The T400s and T410s on the other hand have terrible screens. Very narrow vertical viewing angles, very high black-level and low contrast. This is an objective fact, see reviews here:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Len ... 386.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Len ... 081.0.html

The contrast and black-level figures are worse than any other business or consumer notebook or netbook. I imagine the screen will be fine for audio applications, but it won't be enjoyable for DVDs, nor in general, nor suitable for photographic work.

(2) The T400s has a bad reputation for reliability. Random shutdowns and screen problems. Jury is out on the T410s, but should be better.

(3) The weight of the multi-touch T410s is 2.05kg, 300g above that of the standard version. The thickness also goes up to 30mm at the rear, compared to 26mm of the standard version. It's still good for what it is, but perhaps something to be aware of.

(4) No pen functionality, just touch with the tips of your fingers. Less precise, obviously. The multi-touch functionality is quite good under Windows 7, with gestures working about as well as the trackpad, which is to say OK, but nowhere near the level of responsiveness and reliability of an Apple trackpad / iPhone / iPad. Under XP you can forget about the limited multi-touch (which does exist), because the driver is so poor. Fine for single touch.

(5) The T410s has an eSata port (not sure about T400s). Works fine for me. Running XP now, I made sure to load the AHCI (SATA native) drivers during XP installation (you'll need a floppy drive). Plug and play, once Windows has booted, but not visible in BIOS nor bootable. Can't say what happens under XP, if you don't install the AHCI drivers.

Perhaps a large (expensive) SSD would do you for audio applications? You have to be careful about what you buy. Early SSDs were prone to severe stuttering and poor write rates, however fundamentally the technology should cope better with the demands of continuous reading / writing by the audio application and the simultaneous random accesses by the OS. I'm not an expert on audio applications, so I would check with someone who is, but just an idea. You could also read all the content Anand Lal Shimpi has written about SSDs on his site http://www.anandtech.com, if you've got patience and are technically minded. It might help to weed out what SSD is built on what controller architecture and what may be suitable or not.

[epu]

Very informative and I am very appreciative of the fact that you were able to give me an objective and factual comparison. I also wasn't completely aware that the T400s uses 1.8 Hard Drives. Not a plus by any means unless I went the more expensive SSD route, and more people seem to be in the SLC camp over the MLC camp (even more expensive). The idea of having two SSDs installed seems enticing, but many of the other drawbacks you pointed out made me reconsider. The T400s looks great on paper (aesthetically too), but perhaps my best bet would be biting the bullet and purchasing both Win 7 and an eSATA express card (perhaps the ones made by SIIG) and using an external HDD. There aren't any large capacity Express Card SSDs that are SLC, otherwise, I wouldn't be considering this debate in the first place.

[FragrantHead]

I'd forgotten about the 1.8" HDD size. No, not a plus. SSDs much harder to get and conventional disks slow. Speaking of SSDs, I guess they still make SLC ones for enterprise applications, but I think the trend is towards MLC for everyone in the long run. I could be wrong, but have the impression SLC was merely a stepping stone and now that controllers are becoming more sophisticated, they're fading. Again I can heartily recommend Anandtech for his investigative journalism ... of mostly MLC drives.

If you didn't mind the weight, a T410/T510 would solve the HDD size problem and the T510 would give you a much nicer screen, compared to T4x0/T4x0s, albeit 16:9. I think the HD+ (1600x900) and FHD (1920x1080) screens are quite well regarded. Not touchscreens though, if that's what you are looking for.

[zhenya]

We have been rolling out T410s' here at work, and I've just received one for myself. I would agree that the screen is the biggest drawback. It's very bright, but terrible viewing angles. Otherwise, it's a nice machine. Much much lighter than my previous 14" z61t. I don't know what the x200 draws for power, but I can't see how the T410s could be said to 'eat power' - they typically use about 10 watts if your power management is set reasonably. That gets me 4-5 hours on the main battery, and I choose to use a 2nd battery rather than a 2nd hard drive or dvd drive, giving me 6-8 hours of life.

The primary reason we went with the T410s is that it is pretty much a full-sized 14" laptop that is considerably thinner and lighter than the normal T410, with the 1.8" drive being the only compromise. Since we are using Intel SSD's which have exactly the same price and performance in the 1.8" size as the 2.5" size, there is no compromise. I would forget about the MLC/SLC stuff and just go with a 160GB Intel drive. They are truly amazing, and until you have experienced them first-hand, you cannot believe the difference they make in everyday use. Assuming the issue with your audio files is read/write speed, the Intel drive will take it all in stride. My performance testing has shown the Intel drives to be better than 3 desktop 3.5" drives in RAID 0. When I cloned my data from my old laptop to the new, I was able, for the first time ever, to saturate my gigabit network, writing from one Intel SSD to another. Phenomenal.

[davepol]

I have both X200T and T510 FHD and I used to own T400 (1440x900). I can with all honestly said that FHD screen is surprisingly good although not as good as X200T. As far as my T400 the reason why I sold it was poor quality screen if T410s have same screens you will surely miss your X200T

[FragrantHead]

@zhenya: You're very enthusiastic about the Intel SSDs, perhaps with good reason, but I'd offer some words of caution nonetheless:

(1) They used to be simply the best for handling random writes (as would be made by the OS), hugely more efficient than mechanical hard disks, as well as other SSDs, but their Achilles heel is their sequential write speed, which is rated at 70MB/s, as far as I remember. That's actually slower than a good mechanical drive and slower than practically any other SSD. I own an X25-M and the best I've seen in my own, completely unscientific and informal, testing is about half that speed. Manufacturer's claims never stack up, do they? Perhaps it was the formatting - clusters should coincide with SSD block - issue, I don't know.

(2) According to Anandtech the Intels have been surpassed for a while now by other manufacturers. That said the quality control of Intel and Samsung, the latter not well rated for performance, seems to be more stringent than the small manufacturers (on the whole, even Intel had some firmware issues last year).

(3) Have I got it right that the original poster wants to do audio recording or perhaps composing from samples or something like that? Maybe I just assumed. Anyhow, audio is a finnicky application. For example to play audio, XP needs to process a hardware interrupt every 10ms, no exceptions, otherwise you'll get pops and clicks. When those happen in a consumer / business environment it's no big deal and you probably won't even notice. In a recording environment it is, of course, a big deal. As far as I know (professional) PCs for that purpose must be put together quite carefully. epu is being fussy about eSata cards and whether to keep running XP or upgrade to 7. This would be the reason, I think. XP is a known quantity for audio. Mechanical hard disks tend to be predictable. SSDs, on the other hand, can go off and spend time reorganising their memory. No problem for an ordinary user, still too quick for you to notice, but unacceptable for audio recording, if it causes drop-outs. I am playing Devil's Advocate here and I think I'm making it sound worse than it is. I simply don't know. I'd just recommend for the original poster to get a second opinion from someone, a different forum perhaps, who does whatever he/she is doing with the PC.

A complete aside: A colleague of mine bought an AKASA USB drive enclosure, which he used to listen to MP3s. I had bought two for backup and found them completely unreliable, with reproducible CRC errors in the backups. I said to him, "Have you noticed any problems with your enclosure?". He said, "No, it's great", recommending it warmly. But he started listening out for artifacts and there were, in fact, these quite big drop-outs in the music that he'd never put down to a technical glitch with the enclosure before. I subsequently searched the Internet and could not find any widespread complaints, yet I had 2 2.5" enclosures with exactly the same problem and my colleague's was 3.5"...

[zhenya]

@zhenya: You're very enthusiastic about the Intel SSDs, perhaps with good reason, but I'd offer some words of caution nonetheless:

(1) They used to be simply the best for handling random writes (as would be made by the OS), hugely more efficient than mechanical hard disks, as well as other SSDs, but their Achilles heel is their sequential write speed, which is rated at 70MB/s, as far as I remember. That's actually slower than a good mechanical drive and slower than practically any other SSD. I own an X25-M and the best I've seen in my own, completely unscientific and informal, testing is about half that speed. Manufacturer's claims never stack up, do they? Perhaps it was the formatting - clusters should coincide with SSD block - issue, I don't know.

(2) According to Anandtech the Intels have been surpassed for a while now by other manufacturers. That said the quality control of Intel and Samsung, the latter not well rated for performance, seems to be more stringent than the small manufacturers (on the whole, even Intel had some firmware issues last year).

Yes, I am very enthusiastic - and with good reason. We have over a dozen of these drives running in our small office, and it's been 10 years, probably more, since I saw a hardware improvement that made this big of a difference to normal users, every time you use the computer. Restarting is no longer a big deal - it takes 20 seconds. Programs open instantly. There is NO lag at all. We have not had a single issue with an Intel drive yet. The same cannot be said of their competitors, of which I tried a couple of drives before settling on the Intels. The Samsungs and other OEM's of the world were reliable, but not very fast. The OCZ's were fast in benchmarks, but slower than the Intel day to day - and extremely spotty with reliability. I realize that this has changed in the 18 months since I did my testing, but at the time, I could not help but feel like OCZ was largely a company using other's tech, in ways they did not fully understand, and using paying customers as their guinea pigs. I was not impressed.

Anyhow, the Intel drives are plenty fast enough. The 34nm 160gb drive is rated at 100MB/sec sequential write, but I know from experience it is more than that - I transferred many GB's of data when moving to my new T410s, and was seeing sustained writes of 120-130 MB/sec - at which point the gigabit network was saturated. I have no idea if it could have done more.

(3) Have I got it right that the original poster wants to do audio recording or perhaps composing from samples or something like that? Maybe I just assumed. Anyhow, audio is a finnicky application. For example to play audio, XP needs to process a hardware interrupt every 10ms, no exceptions, otherwise you'll get pops and clicks. When those happen in a consumer / business environment it's no big deal and you probably won't even notice. In a recording environment it is, of course, a big deal. As far as I know (professional) PCs for that purpose must be put together quite carefully. epu is being fussy about eSata cards and whether to keep running XP or upgrade to 7. This would be the reason, I think. XP is a known quantity for audio. Mechanical hard disks tend to be predictable. SSDs, on the other hand, can go off and spend time reorganising their memory. No problem for an ordinary user, still too quick for you to notice, but unacceptable for audio recording, if it causes drop-outs. I am playing Devil's Advocate here and I think I'm making it sound worse than it is. I simply don't know. I'd just recommend for the original poster to get a second opinion from someone, a different forum perhaps, who does whatever he/she is doing with the PC.

That could very well be - I have heard of issues such as you describe, but don't know first-hand. The great thing about the T410s though is that you can run the Intel drive as your main OS drive, and add a second traditional drive in the ultrabay.

[epu]

Fragrant is 100% on the money. Audio apps require hard disks that stream data extremely well w/o too man interrupts from the OS and from where its streaming data from. I'm using Pro-Tools and it is an extremely finicky app. I've built desktop systems over the last decade or so that require you to scrutinize every part you use for compatibility and its demands on the OS. I've stuck with XP throughout the Vista affair an Win 7's introduction because almost every app works best on XP, a tried and true, predictable OS. Win7 being more stable and 64 Bit (with developers working on 64 bit apps for a very long time since Vista's 64 foray) has prompted many users now to make the switch, particularly with many apps now being able to work within these 64 Bit hosts (while many office apps worked just fine, many of the Audio apps just wouldn't cooperate).

I've been using SSDs for sometime, and my only reason for bringing up the SLC vs MLC debate was because of my experience with my M-Tron Expresscard SSD, which was based off of their SLC 2.5 drives. The speed is a jaw-dropper. I've used it to record and mix, and although it is only 16GB, the 100MB R/W times made it the most important upgrade I made in a while. I've just read a lot of negative things about MLC drives which is why I opted to stay away from them; even the Intels. Companies like G-Monster have released SLC drives in the 256-512GB range, but they're too expensive.

If I came into some money, I'd buy a T400s and outfit it with two large capacity SLC drives. Upon second thought however, the swivel screen, stylus input and multitouch capabilities really make the X2xx range stand out. Whenever I purchase a Thinkpad, I always fall in love with the Machine, but always think, "Man, there's always something missing....."

[zhenya]

Fragrant is 100% on the money. Audio apps require hard disks that stream data extremely well w/o too man interrupts from the OS and from where its streaming data from. I'm using Pro-Tools and it is an extremely finicky app. I've built desktop systems over the last decade or so that require you to scrutinize every part you use for compatibility and its demands on the OS. I've stuck with XP throughout the Vista affair an Win 7's introduction because almost every app works best on XP, a tried and true, predictable OS. Win7 being more stable and 64 Bit (with developers working on 64 bit apps for a very long time since Vista's 64 foray) has prompted many users now to make the switch, particularly with many apps now being able to work within these 64 Bit hosts (while many office apps worked just fine, many of the Audio apps just wouldn't cooperate).

I've been using SSDs for sometime, and my only reason for bringing up the SLC vs MLC debate was because of my experience with my M-Tron Expresscard SSD, which was based off of their SLC 2.5 drives. The speed is a jaw-dropper. I've used it to record and mix, and although it is only 16GB, the 100MB R/W times made it the most important upgrade I made in a while. I've just read a lot of negative things about MLC drives which is why I opted to stay away from them; even the Intels. Companies like G-Monster have released SLC drives in the 256-512GB range, but they're too expensive.

If I came into some money, I'd buy a T400s and outfit it with two large capacity SLC drives. Upon second thought however, the swivel screen, stylus input and multitouch capabilities really make the X2xx range stand out. Whenever I purchase a Thinkpad, I always fall in love with the Machine, but always think, "Man, there's always something missing....."

Well, obviously you should check with others who use the same software to determine if your usage is compatible with the hardware you want to run. I still maintain that it is not necessary to spring for an SLC drive. I doubt that you would even notice the difference between an SLC and good MLC drive in most day to day use. The Intels have write speeds that exceed that of your SLC drive you have experience with, and read speeds that are 2.5 times greater! In any case, in many ways it is the low access time that makes a SSD 'feel' so fast compared to a traditional drive. Keep reading, because there are very few people (with real experience) who have anything negative to say about the MLC Intel drives.

[epu]

Very well then Zhenya. I will further look into both. I think the real culprit will ultimately upgrading to Win 7 64 to have more memory to play around with and allocate to programs. Since I can't get Win 7/64 for my X200 Tablet by way of purchasing recovery CDs (would rather have this done the easy way than purchasing upgrade Discs from Vista 32 from Microsoft, and then manually installing drivers, etc), the objective now is to either replace my Tablet w/a T400s (for being able to hold two drives locally, possibly two 128GB SSDs), or purchasing the Win 7/64 Upgrade, a 128GB SSD, An External eSATA case, another SSD drive to put in the External SSD case and run that from my X200T (I also need to buy a replacement case for my X200T because its falling apart; cheap plastic vs. the older thinkpads).

Seems kind of like a no-brainer, though I'd miss my lovely display and swivel screen. What do you think is better?

Minimum Purchases
From Amazon:

Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade From Vista 32 = $189
128GB Lenovo SSD Drives = $330 (Perhaps Cheaper If I Go w/2.5 Cheaper Drives)
New Casing For My X200 Tablet = $120

MY AUDIO SAMPLES REQUIRE A LOT OF HARD DRIVE SPACE, SO IF I STAYED WITH MY X200T, I'd most likley require a 256GB or 512GB SSD rather than a 128GB one so I could rely on my ONE SYSTEM DRIVE plus my 16GB Expresscard SSD. (If I did the T400s, I could just purchase two 128GB SSDs).

Other options:

I could just sell my current X200T and purchase a NEW X200T w/a 128GB SSD and Win7/64 already installed. I already have the XP downgrade discs if needed. I already have my 16GB Express Card SSD and could use that as a second drive, and perhaps store large files on a SDHC card (how reliable are those cards?).

I AM doing research here. Perhaps you guys could give me even more information.

By the way, I am also a Teacher/Student. I'm wondering if I could purchase the Win 7/64 Ultimate upgrade for even cheaper.