Elite Thinkpad X100e - SSD?

[t4thomas]

Hi All,

I've recently ordered an Elite Thinkpad X100e (Dual-Core L625, 4GB RAM, integrated 3G), with a view to using this as my primary personal machine.

Typical usage is unlikely to be much more than standard office fare, but I would also like to use this machine for some bad development in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server Express 2008. To that end, I believe that an Intel X25-M (G2) SSD will likely provide the missing piece of my good-enough performance jigsaw, but wondered if any of you have had any experience using the X100e with a SSD?

Look forward to your response.

Kind regards,

Thomas

[morkli]

My X100e is configured the same as yours and I've got the 160GB Intel X25-M (G2) in it. It's totally transformed the machine. It's very zippy now when compared to the 320GB 5400rpm HDD that came as standard. I'm running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. Office 2010 (again 64-bit) apps open in less than 2 seconds. I've had this config for a few months now and the Intel SSD was a great deal at the time. If I was going to buy an SSD now, I'd be looking at the 240GB Sandforce 1200 based units. They should be even faster than the Intel SSDs. Hope this helps.

[t4thomas]

Thanks Morkli,

I'd love the 160GB Intel X25-M (G2), but I'm not sure I can justify £320 for a £500 notebook; I was actually thinking about the 80GB flavour. That said, I am also tempted by the 120GB OCZ Vertex 2.

[ThinkRob]

I am also tempted by the 120GB OCZ Vertex 2.

Just my $0.02, but I would steer clear of the Sandforce controllers 'til they get all the bugs worked out. The controller in my Agility 2 (also an SF-1200) died after less than three months of light use, taking a couple gigs of data with it.

[morkli]

Just my $0.02, but I would steer clear of the Sandforce controllers 'til they get all the bugs worked out. The controller in my Agility 2 (also an SF-1200) died after less than three months of light use, taking a couple gigs of data with it.

Sorry to hear that. Thanks for the info though.

Cheers,

[Colonel O'Neill]

Office 2010 (again 64-bit) apps open in less than 2 seconds.

You don't really need an SSD to do that; my X100e with whatever stock platter drive it came with opens Office 2010 pretty much instantaneously in both 32-bit and 64-bit (dual-booting x86 and x64 on it).

Somehow, it manages to boot faster than my T400 with a 320GB Scorpio Black.

[morkli]

You don't really need an SSD to do that; my X100e with whatever stock platter drive it came with opens Office 2010 pretty much instantaneously in both 32-bit and 64-bit (dual-booting x86 and x64 on it).

Somehow, it manages to boot faster than my T400 with a 320GB Scorpio Black.

Probably not a fair comparison because of prefetch/superfetch. These are turned off by Windows 7 when using an SSD.

[hmmwv]

I have a 30G Vertex 2 in my x100e, definitely made the machine faster and last longer. I'm having major space issue now though, I had to install Starcraft 2 on my 16G MicroSDHC card

[madmonkey]

Can you post benchmarks on your 30G Vertex? I just installed a 120G Vertex 2, and getting roughly half the write performance that I expected. Read performance is on par with the reviews I've seen, except that 4k random read with queue depth=1 is 12MB instead of 15-18MB/sec. I have heard that if a large amount of writing is done to a Sandforce drive, it will scale back the write performance attempting to make the flash last longer. I'm planning to wait a week or two and see if the perf nudges back up or not. If that's not the case, then I'm concerned that the SATA controller in this laptop may be the bottleneck.

I have the elite X100e as well, with 3G of RAM, and an OCZ Vertex 2 120G with firmware 1.28.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 215.520 MB/s
Sequential Write : 78.557 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 205.024 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 78.032 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 12.388 MB/s [ 3024.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 35.513 MB/s [ 8670.2 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 84.512 MB/s [ 20632.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 72.039 MB/s [ 17587.6 IOPS]

Test : 500 MB [C: 30.3% (23.7/78.0 GB)] (x3)
Date : 2011/02/04 9:50:16
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)