Please help: X301 SSD --> 128 gig read/write speed?

Hello all,

I placed an order for a X301 Lenovo a few days ago and am now realizing I may have made a bad decision regarding my choice of hard drive. I chose the 128 gig SSD.

Since ordering, I've visited these forums in anticipation of my new laptop. I then came across the issue of the read/write speeds of the offered SSD hard drives (64/80/128). I do not know much about computers and did not know SSD's differed so much in performance.

Does anyone know what the read/write speeds of the 128 gig SSD for the current X301? I've searched on the forums and found that it is around 90/70 MB/s, but on the Samsung website, it is mentioning 220/200 mb/s!! Is Lenovo now using this new Samsung SSD (PB22-J)?

I would appreciate any insight into this so I can try and change my order/ cancel and re-order to have the Intel 80 gig...

Thank you!

Mika

 

I have not heard about Lenovo switching to the new Samsung MLC SSD (220/200).

To the best of my knowledge, the 64/128GB drives are slightly older Samsung MLC drives rated at 90/70. The 80GB SSD is the Intel mainstream drive (I believe Lenovo uses the 1.8" variety x-18M) rated at 250/70.

If you really want the new 220/200 Samsung drive (I don't even think it's entered the retail channels yet), your best bet would be to order it with the cheapest drive option availabe (HDD if possible, 64GB Samsung if not) and then swapping in the new Samsung SSD yourself. It is the only way to be sure of what you get.

That being said, the older Samsung MLC SSD is a good drive and plenty fast for most purposes. The big gains an SSD gives to performance is primarily due to its <0.5 ms access time rather than sequential R/W.

 

Thanks Jonlumpkin for your reply! I am wondering two things: how fast a computer will seem due to differences in read/write speeds, and how much of an effect having an SSD with such short access time affect the speed of a computer.

This is probably too simplified, but does having a read speed that is twice as fast as another (e.g. 180 mb/s vs. 90 mb/s) translate to twice the performance in terms of accessing stored data (twice as fast boot time?). In terms of the significantly shortened access time, does that have a large impact on performance? Because I have read about regular HDD's that have a little less than 90/70 read/write, SSD's can't possibly be comparable to HDD in terms of speed right??

Thanks!

 

Look at the detailed SSD effects link in my sig for a good amount of info.

Short Version:

The most important factor in a computer "feeling" fast tends to be the random access speed of the disk. Sequential throughput is generally far less important. This is because most tasks on a computer (including booting Windows) deal with a large quantity of SMALL files scattered all over the disk. An SSD or very fast HDD (e.g. a 10K RPM Raptor) is able to access this wide range of files much quicker than a slower spindle speed HDD even if that HDD has a comparable sequential throughput.

A comparable SSD with a higher sequential throughput will boot faster, but the difference is not going be perfectly linear. In either event, even a "slow" SSD will boot an OS quite quickly.

In general, it depends on the workloads you put your computer through. If you frequently work with very large files then sequential throughput may matter. Note, that this only applies if the files are read in a large chunk rather than piece by piece (e.g. a 5GB movie file is read in such small chunks that even a <10MB/s SDHC card won't have trouble with playing it back in real time).

Note that these generalizations apply best to operating system drives. In some specialized applications (e.g. Lossless video capture) raw sequential speed is the most important thing. As such, a RAID of SSD or HDD with a high sequential speed will work well for that.

 

Thanks again jonlumpkin for your very insightful posts. These answers are exactly what I was hoping to learn.

Mika