W520 with swapped SSD

Anyone done this yet?

I got the W520 this weekend and spent the time adding RAM (working and testing just fine) and adding and doing a fresh install on a Crucial C300 128GB SSD.

With AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark, my read speeds, while not rocking are OK. My write speeds however are very low. In fact my 4k and 4k-64Thrds write speeds are about 4 Mb/s. Which is terribly slow.

I have done all the recommended OS and registry and services.msc tweaks and have the latest Intel driver for our SATA III controller.

Has anyone done their SSD swap yet on the W520? If so could you please share your benchmarks.

Perry

 

The site storage review has looked at SSD speeds in the t520. Hope this is useful Lenovo ThinkPad T520 Review | StorageReview.com

 

Thank you. Unfortunately they did not use any decent benchmarking for the SSD. Only a single overall score.

My read benchmarks are acceptable. My Seq write is OK although a bit low.

My 4k reads are kinda OK, my 4k writes are abysmal.

So I wonder if it is a problem with either the SATA Intel controller, its driver although both are modern and work well in other configurations.

BTW, we don't use a specific Lenovo driver on this SATA interface. It is the latest Intel SATA III driver.

Perry

 

I have a T420, but since the chipset's the same (AFAIK), I can share my experience. I'm using a G2 X25-M that works just great. 4K speeds are no worse than with any other ThinkPad that I've used it in.

 

Is it just me or did the storagereview.com folks forget to test the mSATA drive? I don't see it in the T520 review. It's mentioned but unless I'm blind I don't see any stats. I know they tested it in the mSATA sled months ago, but I'm surprised it wasn't re-tested in the actual slot.

Perry, what kind of stats are you getting with Disk Benchmark | ATTO Technology, Inc. ?

Regarding multiquote, I don't always know I'm going to respond to multiple people. I also don't always remember the feature is there. But if you really feel the need to merge posts, go for it.

 

All reads are good and in expected range.

Writes are Sequential 90 MB/s
4K 3.83 MB/s
4k-64thrds 4.80 MB/s
Acc Time 1.126 ms

As you can see the sequential write is bad but not horrible (should be about 180 MB/s) but the 4Ks are less than 20% of what they should be.

Computer seems pretty snappy but something is likely wrong. I could live with 20-30 MB/s on the 4k writes because I have seen others with those writes although they aren't happy it still is OK.

My 4K writes are pretty equivalent to my HDD.

Perry

 

Can you run Iometer benchmarks and compare them to this?

Iometer - Random Write | bit-tech.net

That performance is dismal... I wonder if something is wrong with the drive (which can be tested in a desktop machine to confirm) or if it's the laptop (try another SSD brand to confirm... both SF-based and non-SF-based).

 

Look under the first part of the system performance section. It is the boot drive that came in the review notebook, so it is there.

 

Ah, I was looking at the second part of the graphs and didn't see it mixed in with the Series 510, Crucial, etc. I wish they would have done that for easier comparison. Oh well.

Thanks for pointing it out.

 

Problem solved.

I had mixed up instructions when I googled for changes to the OS after adding a SSD and had not checked "write cache enabled" in the new drive properties.

The difference between enabled and not enabled was huge.

Here was the before Benchmark:



and here was the after Benchmark:



And remember it is the 4k reads that the drive gurus say is by far the most important.

Perry

 

Great news!