About half a day with the m11x

and Im loving it! The screen and keyboard will take some adjustment, but both are actually quite enjoyable to use for what i bought it for. Going to do a fresh format tomorrow and then I should be set to finish my setup. Cant believe I waited this long to get this laptop.

 

I love the keyboard, but the screen is a little wonky. I mean it is a lot brighter and more crisp than what I expected. But it's almost too directional, if you know what I mean. If you look dead on, it's great, but vary too much in any direction then it either washes out or grows dark.

 

I noticed that too. It is very clear that the screen doesn't compare to the SXPS. But Im fine with that cause its better then I expected, and veiwing angles never really were important to me. I honestly thought the screen was going to be pretty average, but Im actually pleasantly surprised. Im actually loving the way it looks when using it in bed when the room is completely dark. Honestly Id rate it s solid 8.5-9/10.

 

Agreed, screen is really cool but I wish they would have made it a tad bigger. Only down side to the display is that when i stare at it for a while then go to my desktop, that has a 23'' 1080p monitor, it looks all pixelated and old

 

been weith me for like less than a week i'v played all of my Games ! =D
am gona be making video's soon putting them on youtube!

 

You get used to it. And then you have trouble going back to an older laptop, haha.

 

Major congratulations on getting your M11x. I love mine (though I wouldn't mind getting a 1600X900 screen) I'm saving up for a larger HDD since SSDs are still $1-3 per gigabyte.

 

wait a month or two you gona see the price's of SSD going down

 

I got in on the Newegg Intel 120GB deal, I think it's a good deal at this price:

$205 - $35MIR - $25 Newegg Gift Card - 3.5% ebates ~ $138 if you want to look at it that way.

My main reason for an SSD is battery life and vibration. Performance is obviously good too.

 

Unless there's been some very new developments in SSDs that I've missed, they aren't going to give you any better battery life than a mechanical drive.

 

I beg to differ. I have an Intel 80GB in my Hannspree netbook (SU4100, Intel GMA 4500, 2GB RAM) and I got about 4 hrs with a WD Caviar Blue. I get over 5 hours with the Intel. I have used the Kingston SNV425 ("V Series") and got horrible battery life, the OCZ Vertex 2 60GB and got good battery life, the Intel 40GB and super battery life, but best came from the Intel 80GB. The 120GB should be about the same.

It's more advantageous with a netbook only because the machine's total power draw is so small the SSD or HDD are a considerable percentage of battery consumption. 1W is about 10% of total power consumption.

This article linked below seems to confirm what I'm saying as well. In particular the idle power is of most importance for most users since the HDD is 90% idle. Obviously if you run your SSD a lot then you may see different results. But even if watching a movie your SSD isn't running constantly, it only loads a bit at a time. More power efficient SSD's like 5400RPM ones are typically idle at 0.85-1.00W and peak at anywhere from 1.5W to 2.0W.

The power savings is compounded by the fact that SSD's are quicker or more efficient at processing data, so will run less time than an HDD. So even if max power is same as an HDD, it will run at that power for less time.

Benchmark Results: Power Consumption : Roundup: The Best SSDs For Enthusiasts

compare that with the momentus XT. They are magnitudes different.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/seagate-momentus-xt-hybrid-hard-drive-ssd,2638-10.html

 

So far Im used to the screen and keyboard size. The quality difference between the WLED in the SXPS is pretty noticable side by side, but I didnt buy this notebook to compete or even replace my SXPS so its not even close to an issue. I played WoW last night for a bit before bed and it played very very well. I just reformatted it today (2 passes to get it running just right) and I have to say Im even more happy now. Cant wait to test it out at work with my 21.5. Definitely a great purchase and Im very happy that Ill have encrypted access to my home server again.

 

And I stand corrected.

 

I cant understand why anyone is thinking about not doing a SSD upgrade. of course not factory equipped. The prices are ridiculous.

I can remember that hard disc drives cost 260 Euro if you wanted one of the newer models. But this was over 10 years ago.

 

I just upgraded mine to the OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB (107 GB formatted, $229.00) for use and it rocks. Yes, space is limited but nothing you can't manage with a little care. Then, three days later the dreaded hinge problem started up.....

 

Just as a note. I'm using my M11x on battery. With the Intel 120GB SSD, running on Intel graphics, keyboard off, screen brightness at second notch on OSD (25%?), with surfing I'm getting well over 8:30 !!!

Wow.

 

For me capacity isn't there yet for an SSD. I've got multiple ISO's and VMs that I have run for work and need at least 320GB of storage. Once the price/capacity ratio gets in-line with my needs, I'm there.

 

What's your average discharge rate when browsing with wifi?

 

According to battery bar, which I don't really trust with discharge rate, was about 7500. I plan on doing a full power drain with shudowns and reboots in between, but battery bar should give me a decent estimate then, and I'm timing it myself roughly.

I'll measure power draw from the wall later to see if that lines up. Depends on efficiency of the PSU of course, but usually 90% is a fair number for these small power supplies.

I agree though that the capacity of an SSD for the cost is a tough pill to swallow. If it's your main machine it would be difficult to maintain everything under 120GB. My 15" laptop is using over 250GB of space on my 500GB Momentus XT. 256GB SSD's are way too expensive at the moment, as the 120GB Intel was a tough purchase considering it is twice the price of a 500GB HDD at four times the capacity.

All depends on your needs though. I was about to get a 250GB Momentus XT (less vibration and power than the 320GB or 500GB) before I saw the deal on the Intel SSD.

 

Because I want 500GB of space?

 

Exactly. Depends on your use, and less space means a lot more maintenance and/or access to external or network storage. Even though I have a Windows Home Server setup, I still like to keep a lot of stuff local, because on the go I won't always have access to my WHS (although these days it does get easier to network remotely).

Even at $1/GB, if you need a 500GB SSD, it's still super expensive. I don't see SSD's becoming mainstream until 256GB drives are about $0.50/GB. But by then our storage needs will probably have increased and need a 500GB SSD at less than $0.50 per GB. Not to mention with most SSD's you need to buy one roughly twice the size of storage you actually need to prevent significant performance degredation. Right now 120-128GB SSD's are the sweet spot. Still expensive, but affordable with enough space to actually make it useable, at least for a laptop.

 

This and the size of the m11x is why I went with it and why I chose an r1 over an r2. I do think about possibly upgrading to ultimate since the only issue with my current setup is I cannot RDP into the wifes netbook. Other then that the single paltter 250GB will actually serve me well as it yields better battery life then the larger drive.

This and the fact that SSDs have a known limited rear write life span is why Im still with cyclical drives. For this notebook 250GB is actually spot on for me ATM since its only a mobile rig. While it would be pretty nice to have a 640GB drive in this, I just dont need or want to carry that much data on this laptop.

 

Yeah most 250GB drives are single platter, so are quiet and consume less power than larger drives. To be honest what would be ideal is a 1.8" drive at 5400RPM that would be cool, quiet, and low power, and at that size because the aeral density is higher probably wouldn't perform much less than that of a 7200RPM drive.

 

So after a weekend of considerable use and allowing the new computer haze to wear off and the reality of a $700 purchase set in I have to say Im still very happy with the laptop. But I have started to realize that the adjustment I need to realize and come to grips with is the difference in performance between my m11x and the SXPS. Going from a full i7 quad core, and tons of storage to a ULV core 2 duo and limited storage. The performance difference is VERY big, but I need to realize what I bought the laptop and not become disappointed because of the limited power.

For a cyclical drive yes, but if youre going for absolute battery life you do have to go SSD. I will probably make the conversion when the technology takes a considerable jump in reliability and lifespan. FOr now Ill enjoy my dead silent m11x in all its glory.

 

Yeah, well I was using an SU4100 / Intel GMA powered netbook for a while, so for the size I'm happy with the performance. Before I couldn't play any recent title. Now I can.

And lifespan for SSD's aren't as bad as people make them out to be. The Intel's have been out for over two years now, and going strong. If you do lots of writes to the drive, like 100GB a day or something crazy like that, you will kill it fairly quickly. But for most users they should last a good five years before showing any signs of degradation. Most people replace their drives every 3 years anyhow.

 

Until a few days ago, I had 2x74GB raptors in Raid-0 since 2003.

 

There are exceptions. I had my 150GB Raptor for over four years before I sold it. I still think for what most people use their drives for an SSD will last well beyond five years, especially as a boot drive. Once you install the OS, your total writes will be minimal. If you do lots and lots of writes to your SSD then you're best to go with an SLC drive anyhow. For day to day use it should be fine. Most come with 3 to 5 year warranties anyhow. In 3 to 5 years SSD tech will be quite advanced and I'm sure they won't carry back stock of all the older drives for warranty so will most likely get a newer tech drive.

 

I try to keep tech until it dies. I will always find a task for old hardware, heck I still use a 7 year old p4 setup. I do intend to do SSD one day for the m11x or whatever I may have when I feel comfortable with the technology. I do admit getting an SSD for the m11x to speed up load times would make it more appealing. Maybe post Christmas would be a time to look into some with the deals.

 

If you can live with data under 100GB for a 120-128GB drive, it's great. Otherwise, anything larger is just so prohibitively expensive. I mean I bought this refurb unit for $499, and spent $200 on an SSD, that's like 40% the cost of the entire machine.

 

Well to be fair you can transfer the SSD to your next machine if that helps to justify spending on such an expensive addition.

According to SSD Life the Crucial M225 I have in my machine will last 6 years which is much longer than I plan to keep the m11x.

 

Not to further draw out the old SSD vs. HD debate, but I really won't have a home computer without an SSD. The performance and overall "snappiness" of an SSD is something I can't do without. I go to work (we actually have decent machines) and Photoshop takes more than a minute to open. At home on my M11x R1 takes like 20 seconds to open.
The first time I used an SSD was on my eeepc 1000. It went from being a toy to been a real computer.
My guess is that an i7 M11X with a standard HD and M11X R1 with a good SSD will perform about the same in "real world" usage.

 

CPU speed doesn't really have anything to do with storage I/O. It won't speed up games, only load times, but system responsiveness is overall improved. Anything cached to the SSD will load without delay.

The main advantage as far as performance is the minimal response time with an SSD since it doesn't have to wait for a physically moving platter to read data, it's nearly instantaneous. And there's no fragmentation to worry about on an SSD either because fragmentation isn't relevant.

If you can have two drives in your system, then I think an SSD as a boot drive makes a lot of sense. Otherwise if you need storage space, you're spending a lot of coin that could be spent elsewhere or not at all. If you're getting an SSD purely for performance increase on a gaming machine, then you're running down the wrong path, as mainly game levels will load faster, and well, that's it. Unless the game persistently updates data from the hard drive, but there's not many that do that (Microsoft Flight Simulator comes to mind).

The main advantages I see in a laptop are battery life and minimal to no vibration and/or sound if you're sensitive to that. Performance is a great benefit obviously.

 

The only reasons why I would get an SSD is to max the performance and battery life of the m11x. The more and more we talk about it the more I want to buy an SSD.

 

After breaking in my notebook, I'm thinking I should get an ssd (one day). the stock HDD is way too slow and loading Mass Effect 2 can sometimes take more than 1-2 minutes each time a load screen appears... I don't even want to get started on the speed to launch other programs.

 

Hey Liquid, congratz on gettin the M11x, I had VERY HIGH expectation before buying this note, coming out of a 13" Vostro, I was very surprised, it's smaller, much more mobile, but not too small by most standarts, it deinitely surpassed all my expectations.

Also I bough on ebay a Dell 5520 3g modem and installed internally, so now it trully is ultraportable, I don't need that huge 3g pen thing sticking out on a usb port.

The more people here talked about SSD and the more I read it, it became obvious I needed one, I was gonna buy the Seagate Hybrid Momentus XT 500gb, but I decided to get a 256gb ssd, it's arriving tomorrow, it was expensive, but somehow I don't think I'll be disappointed.

 

What brand/model SSD if you don't mind me asking?

 

I've been looking at those Seagate hybrid drives too.
Power consumption is slightly higher than a standard hdd, but the system boot and app start times are delicious.
I don't think you'll be disappointed with the SSD though. They are super snappy.

 

Yeah, I agree. My OCZ Vertex 2 120GB has made my laptop feel faster than my i7 930/HD5870CF desktop It just seems "snappier" than my desktop. Though I only realized after returning to my desktop after about a month of only using my m11x.

 

I bough a Samsung MMDPE56G5DXP 256gb SSD, however I live in Brazil, so I didn't really have a lot of options, unless I was prepared to pay (even more)top dollar, it costed me around US$500, which is around only a 1/3 more what it costs the 128gb ssd here on a brazilian ebay like site.

 

The hybrid Seagate Momentus XT is a nice drive, yes. But keep in mind - the "snappy-ness" of an SSD comes from its ability to multi-task, measured by IOPS (specifically, random IOPS and random read speeds).

Most people look at hard drive / SSD speeds, and pay attention only to sequential transfer rates, because they are the big numbers. Or, they pay attention to boot times or load times of single applications. Any drive can have large sequential read times. Any drive can load a single application relatively quickly. In sequential transfer times, an SSD is only about 3x faster than a fast 7200rpm drive (app 250MBps vs. 80MBps). Or, you reduce load times of a single application from 5sec to 2sec. Not a very big deal.

Where an SSD shines is its ability to multitask like a champ. You can do 2-3 things at once on an SSD, and won't feel any kind of slowdown whatsoever. That is the "snappy-ness". You absolutely cannot do that with any drive based on mechanically spinning platters, including the Seagate Momentus XT. When you measure multi-tasking , an SSD is almost two full orders of magnitude faster than a mechanical hard drive (app 35,000 IOPS vs 500 IOPS). It's literally like going from a 56K dial-up modem to a 5Mbps broadband connection.

 

Samsung is actually pretty good. You don't get the high 4k random read/write numbers like other drives, but overall it's a good performer. Some of these earlier drives don't support TRIM. It does have internal garbage collection though that requires sufficient idle time to clean things up. If it doesn't support TRIM, just one recommendation, don't fill it past 200GB or so, otherwise it may never completely recover with the garbage collection and you'll have to secure erase it. I learned the hard way when I owned one in my Envy 14 I had for a while. Otherwise if it supports TRIM you shouldn't have that problem. I believe there is an updated firmware that does support TRIM though if yours doesn't.

 

Thanks! So far Im loving the laptop. Does what I need it to do well and in style and such a small package that I dont even know Im carrying a laptop around. Last night I was gaming, streaming music, surfing the web and running some RDPs and I have to say the rig did it flawlessly. Knowing it can do all that in such a small package is great! As for the SSD Id love to do one to max the performance of this little guy, maybe a decent drive proced well will pop up soon after christmas. Otherwise the 250GB is working very well.

 

So I have adjusted to everything except the darn glossy screen. No matter how many glossy screen laptops I own I never seem to get used to them.

 

I also hate that glossy finish that looks good in a store but is a magnet for fingerprints, so I bought a Decal Vinyl Skin, from the ebayer below, it looked awesome, however it took 3 persons to apply it perfectly on my M11x, easy to install my a$$.

Also the SSD has arrived, so far the note is very, very fast, the old installation the boot up time used to take around 3m40s, that was down to like 40-50s.

It's not just boot time, you can also feel the note is way more responsive, before it used to lags in some applications, now it doesn't.

I'm now, after testing it, doing a clean windows 7, the alienware version that came with it, install on it.

 

Yeah. I bought one of those green onions screens. I was pretty irritated trying to get it on, but see my post here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/541404-green-onions-anti-glare-piece-crap.html

Some good tips there, except it's like going to extremes. I still don't understand why Dell didn't offer a matte screen option, even for $25-$50 considering people are spending that on screen protectors, it'd be better to have it integrated.

Good to hear. Hope it works out for you. If I could afford it I'd get a nice 240-256GB SSD for my laptop.