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I currently have a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 — I got it a little over 2 years ago and have loved it. Lenovo support, while crumby at first, really came through the other time I needed them — calling to schedule a repair on a Saturday morning in order to get my repaired laptop back to me by the following Tuesday.
My T60 comes with a 2.33Ghz Core Duo (original) and 2GB of ram; a decent performer for typical laptop work. The reason I’ve been thinking about an upgrade recently is the weight, battery life and possibly getting an solid state drive for disk-intensive activities. With the 9-cell battery and optional 3-cell battery all installed, the laptop is 6.3 lbs — too heavy to comfortable carry around in one hand like a plate and heavy enough in a laptop bag that hanging it off my shoulder during conference makes me want to go see a chiropractor.
Recently I’ve been getting enamored with some of these high-performance, ultra-light-weight laptops that Lenovo has been offering. More specifically the 12.1″ ThinkPad X200s and the 13.3″ ThinkPad X301.
NOTE: The difference between the X200 and X200s is the higher resolution screen on the “s” version. Also the X301 is a refreshed X300 that has now replaced it.
One of the most important features I was looking for on one of these new laptops (because they all offer excellent weight and battery performance) was the SSD option. The X200 and X301 both offer it, which is great.
Unfortunately, as some of you may know, not all is well in the world of SSDs. There was first the discovery by AnandTech that SSDs using JMicron-based controllers introduced huge performance penalties in machines under normal multitasking use. Then there was the recent discovery that the previously-thought-incredible Intel X25-M SSDs degrade performance over time — due to some poor logic in the controller attempting to increase the logevity of the drive.
At this point I wanted to make damn sure of the exact SSD that Lenovo was shipping inside their ThinkPads. As luck would have it — many other people online wanted to know this as well.
From some reading online it looks like Lenovo is shipping Samsung MMCQE28G8MUP-0VA 128GB SSDs in their ThinkPads (Post #1, Post #2). In addition to that, Steven Moix, a technologist and Linux guru, blogged about the SSD in his ThinkPad 301 and optimizing it’s performance under Linux by tuning the scheduler algorithm.
So for anyone that is on the fence about a new ThinkPad laptop and wanted to know more about the SSDs Lenovo was shipping out — there you go. It looks like you are safe and other people have tred that hallowed ground before you to make sure it was safe.
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October 21st, 2009 at 10:54 pm
I myself just purchased a T500 with that exact model hard drive. I’m glad to hear it should be reliable for time to come.
October 22nd, 2009 at 6:34 am
Samuel,
How’s the performance of the machine with the SSD in it? I still haven’t made the jump yet, very excited to at some point though.
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Performance is pretty good actually. Standard SSD rules apply: very fast seek and random read performance, random write performance is only so-so. I do get decent sustained write performance though, better than many other consumer levels SSDs currently on the market.
The biggest difference for me is the very responsive feel of the OS. Programs load almost instantly (with superfetch/prefetch turned off in vista), and while I haven’t tried any really heavy apps yet, MS Office programs all load instantly, Eclipse IDE opens in about 3 seconds, and app installs are very swift. Games load and run perfectly.
I have no idea how it compares to a fast 7200 RPM traditional drive for more disk intensive applications like video editing. But for day to day tasks it certainly makes everything feel faster. And ultimately, latency is probably more important 90% of the time for me anyway. Overall, I’m very happy with it.
I’m not sure how ready SSDs are for server and high performance desktop applications, especially without being part of a large RAID array, but it definitely kicks some butt in my notebook.
October 22nd, 2009 at 4:12 pm
The “Eclipse loads in 3 seconds” made me drool a little… I wonder if performance will keep up as the workspace gets beefier with index files and caches… if it does, I want one… REALLY BAD
October 22nd, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Yea, I use Eclipse for PHP development (”Zend Studio”), and there isn’t a whole lot in it yet (but it’s also not like a stock Eclipse workspace either), but it was wonderful the first time I opened it. Took at least 30-45 seconds on my old machine. It also helps that my SSD is paired with a 2.8 GHz Core2 and 4GB of RAM, but nonetheless, fast load times are awesome. Oh, and to add to your drool… Vista boots from BIOS to Desktop in about 20 seconds. I don’t even bother with sleep/hibernate very often anymore, cause it boots so fast. I tested Win7 a few days ago, and that was even quicker.
The days of spinning disks and hovering needles are numbered…
October 23rd, 2009 at 8:48 am
Oh man that sounds unbelievably nice. I doubt I’ll buy or build another computer come next year that doesn’t have an SSD in it. I do Java EE dev in Eclipse, so you can imagine how appealing that is.