Questions about the 16gb ssd cache drive of Y400

Hi,

I just got my Y400 today with 16gb ssd as a cache drive.
What is the brand of your 16gb ssd that it comes with?
Mine is Samsung, but i heard that someone has a Sandisk one....
Does lenovo switch the 16gb ssd to a Samsung one from now on?
I also noticed that the transfer rate of my Samsung 16 gb ssd is 3gb/s,
But the transfer rate of the Sandisk 16gb ssd is 6gb/s....
Does this matter when you use it as a cache drive to boost up the 1TB Sata which has a transfer rate of 3gb/s only?

Thanks!

 

Since you are looking for an answer, this is not something to even bother about. It is not making any difference, since at the end of the day you will have the speed of the hard drive which is 5400 rpm. The SSD is just a boost for few seconds...

If you really want to do something about it and you are willing to spend a little money + to open up the system, buy another mSATA drive (I would recommend atleast of 80GB), that may cost you ~100$ or even much less; it depends where you live... And have that sucker of 16GB taken out of your system and replaced with a larger one; secondly, install a fresh copy of windows directly on the mSATA drive and then you will be really happy about it.

IN TODAYS WORLD OF COMPUTERS, AN SSD AS A OPERATING SYSTEM IS A MUST!

 

but i am still wondering if the 1 TB SATA transfer rate is 3gb/s, does that mean the ssd can only use up to 3gb/s transfer rate as a cache drive to help boost up the SATA?

 

When you say 3Gbps / 6Gbps, you're talking about the difference between SATA-2 and SATA-3. Both the 2.5" SATA drive bay and the mSATA drive bay support SATA-3 (6Gbps). So as long as you have SATA-3 compatible drives installed, they should operate in SATA-3 mode. And just FYI, just about any drive you buy these days will support SATA-3 mode.

However, SATA-2 or SATA-3 mode is nearly irrelevant in real-world performance, for two reasons:

1) The additional bandwidth of SATA-3 will only apply in sequential data transfers,, which only account for 5% of typical use. The remaining 95% of typical use is going to be random data access patterns. And even the fastest drives available today can hit only up to 100MBps (equivalent to 0.8Gbps) on random read / writes.

SATA-2 or SATA-3 is nearly irrelevant in daily use. The only reason people pay attention to SATA-2/3 at all is because it's a big number to look pretty for the girls. It's like a golfer who can hit a 320yd drive, or a baseball player that can hit a 450 foot home run, or an american football quarterback who can throw the ball 90 yards. They are sexy numbers. But the performance that really matters is whether you can sink your 8 yard putts, or hit a single/double base hit, or consistently throw your 8 yard passes.

2) It is even more irrelevant for mechanical hard disk drives (HDD), like the 1TB drive that comes pre-installed. The fastest speed a mechanical HDD is capable of achieving in ANY kind of data access pattern (random or sequential, read or write) is going to be sequential read access. And even in those cases, the fastest hard drives are only capable of reaching about 150MBps (1.2Gbps). That does not even come close to saturating a SATA-2 connection, let alone SATA-3.