Thinkpads with ssd owners I got some questions?

1.How quick is your boot time?
2. Have they been any drawbacks from your ssd?
3.What brand ssd did you get and why?

I am planing on getting a W520 with a ssd soon.

 

12 seconds from POST to login, including the time it takes to type in my FDE passwords.

No. But price may be an issue for some.

Intel X25-M, later X25-E. Rationale: I value my data, so OCZ's out, and c. 2009 Intel was the only other option with decent performance. I moved to an SLC drive (the X25-E) recently due to its excellent performance and longevity.

 

~20 Seconds, haven't actually timed it haha, mainly the price/gb is the main drawback otherwise no.

I bought a 96 gb Kingston V+100. It was cheap and had a lot of storage, while not being an OCZ (had good reviews)

 

1.- Haven't timed it. I'd estimate around 30 seconds in total from power button press to desktop with all my programs loaded.

2.- Relatively smaller space would bother some, but it's not a problem at all for me. I have between 50-60% used on both my T500 and X120e. Price was the barrier for me, but SSD prices are going down now, so it's better.

3.- Intel X25-M G2 80GB for my T500: at the time, it was one of the best-performing SSDs, and it is still one of the most reliable SSDs, with very low failure rates and good support. Power consumption is also better than many drives of the time.

Samsung Series 470 64GB for my X120e: affordable pricing and great reliability on par with Intel, with pretty great performance as well. Very low idle power consumption as well.

 

1.How quick is your boot time?
T60 and x61s thinkpads, both with intel 160gb x25-m ssd, boot around 40 seconds. From off to the point where you can open an program.

2. Have they been any drawbacks from your ssd?
Maybe the added pressure to make sure you backup regularily. Which I don't do. If something goes wrong with an SSD it's far less likely you can recover your data than a regular harddrive. The benefits of an SSD outweigh this though.

3.What brand ssd did you get and why?
Intel. They are the most reliable. see here.
Though I recommend you avoid intel's 510 6GBps SSD. It's random reads/writes are slower than intel's 320 3GBps series.

Keep in mind that with the w520 you have the option to use one of intel's msata SSDs (310 series I believe) along with a regular harddrive. This saves you some money, give you benefits of an SSD, along with big storage of a harddrive.

Sometime in 2012 I'd expect Thinkpads to use intel's SRT (Smart Response Technology) where they pair a smaller ssd, 20GB or so with a harddrive. You only see one drive letter, and the system handles caching in the background. You can read about it here at PCper.com.

 

1.How quick is your boot time?
~35s on X100e
~20s on T420i

2. Have they been any drawbacks from your ssd?
Small size on X100e (40GB X25-V as only drive)
None on T420

3.What brand ssd did you get and why?
Intel X25-V; cheap, reliable, low power consumption
Intel 80GB 310 mSATA; mSATA, good value, reliable, low power consumption

(Note BTW that ThinkRob runs Linux, not Windows.)

 

I'm using the Lenovo 256GB Samsung drive with my X200. I haven't timed my boot sequence, but it feels about as snappy as my G73 with an X25M-G1 as its boot drive.

Price will definitely be a con for some folks; I managed to get a fantastic deal for the drive and overall I've been very happy with it. I definitely had a marked increase in battery life; with wifi off and being very liberal with power saving options I'm getting close to nine hours out of my 9-cell.

 

About 14-16 seconds with the Intel 310 mSata (40GB). Very stable, no problems with it so far.

 

25 sec boot time with a fairly clean windows 7 install.
Price/GB is the only downside IMO.
Intel for reliability and performance, x25m (T60) and x18m (T410s).

 

From the moment I press the power button it takes ~20 seconds for my T420 is boot to desktop. With BootTimer it records my bootup as 9.796 secs.

Unfortunately yes, it doesn't like warm reboots! The Intel 510 SSD tends to hang in the BIOS for a bit when restarted, its something to do with the Active Protection System in the BIOS which the Intel 510 (or ThinkPad?) don't like. The problem also exists for other Sandy Bridge ThinkPad's with this SSD. Random 4k's is a bit low too...

Intel had a good reputation for reliability since I had an Intel X25-M SSD for my T61 and it was rock solid. Since the T420 has SATA III capability I thought I might get the SATA III version of the Intel SSD which turns out to be the Intel 510. Daily operation is reliable, no tweaks required and is generally fast. If Intel or Lenovo fix the Warm Reboot issue for this SSD then I would recommend it.

 

I actually had this problem for a while, but I had no idea it had to do with the SSD. It seemed to pop up once I installed my 8GB of RAM...

Anyways, I don't mind waiting an extra 30 seconds for a reboot once in a while.

 

1.How quick is your boot time?
About 25 seconds to desktop

2. Have they been any drawbacks from your ssd?
Not really, I havent experienced any problems with it per se, just make sure you update the firware and configure it correctly a. before you install windows (firmware), and b. after windows is installed (right drivers/configuration e.t.c)

3.What brand ssd did you get and why?
OCZ Vertex 2E for speed and to make my work stuff faster (I got it before SATA 3 came out otherwise I would have gotten a SATA 3 one) - all my data is stored on a secondary drive.

 

1.How quick is your boot time?
Well, I'm on Linux so it's even faster than Windoze, I would say 13 seconds from the power button.

2. Have they been any drawbacks from your ssd?
Absolutely none.

3.What brand ssd did you get and why?
I got Intel only. In T410 40GB Intel X25-V, for system (still 50% free but again, I'm on linux) and have a spare 7200k drive in ultrabay for all data etc.
In my X200s I got Intel X25-M 160GB as my main harddrive. It's fast as a speed of light

 

Is there a big different in speed between ssd and the msata+HDD?

 

I do not have msata, I use second hdd in ultrabay instead of optical drive.
My system (/) and home partition (/home) are on ssd in T410 so I can keep rest of the files on normal hdd.

Overall, with ssd prices going down, it's the best upgrade you can do for your computer

 

1. Boot Duration: 19980ms (according to eventviewer log files)
2. The price
3. Crucial M4 128GB: Because it's one of the fastest SATA3 SSD's, it's easily 'moddable' (from 9 to 7mm) and the price is not too bad.

With the newest firmware (0009) it performs even better then with firmware 0001/0002. My before and after score (0002 on the left obviously)

 

If you are mainly using your notebook at home, is there really much point in having to log into Windows by typing a password or using the FPR? It slows things down and is especially annoying if you put the machine into standby often.

 

I've got the Intel 320 in my T420s. Boot time is probably around 20s but I've never timed it.

I have bought it before I decided to get the T420s and fortunately it was just a matter of removing the spacer to get a 7mm drive that the T420s wants.

I've had no problems. Balancing capacity against affordability may be an issue in which case the mSATA SSD + HDD may be a good compromise.

Regarding the logon password: If you don't expect to be in a situation where others can have unwanted access to your computer then there's no reason to use the password.

John

 

Cheers, John. Done.

I assume that rapidboot is just for HDD's and of no benefit to SSD's?

 

I haven't done my homework about how RapidBoot works, but if it helps optimise the startup process as well as the file locations then it will give some benefit even with an SSD. I have got it installed.

John

 

The single best upgrade I have EVER done to a computer... I would only recommend getting an intel model ... We have ocz failures before ... (grain of salt we have only owned a total of 4 SSD's and 2 failures were OCZ so not a huge test pool here)

 

Searching through old threads is inconclusive too. Anyone else got a view on Rapidboot for SSD's?

 

I installed RapidBoot, and it decreased my boot time.

 

By how many fractions of a second?

 

Can somebody please answer this.

 

about 20 seconds here... went with an Intel 310 mSATA (80GB) for application speed and have a 500GB HDD for data storage (far cheaper per GB). No drawbacks yet, except perhaps cost. Chose Intel for supposed reliability.

When bigger SSDs are available at about half their current price I will probably go full SSD for data, too, but until then I cannot justify the price per GB