W230ST - The 13" We've been waiting for!?

Come on! You got a 8250! Why not buy a bigger flight bag?

 

The w230st's all come with a white back light on the keyboard as far as im concerned. It appears in the specs of every build site I have looked at so far.

 

Really? I thought originally it wasn't going to come with it, maybe I'm thinking of something else. No dice on the larger flight bag, it won't fit in a overhead then. I'm trying to see if I can "ease" the stitching a little because this thing just barely is too big.

 

I'm thinking of buying one of these as well(see sig) just because 15.6"/6+lb. just wasn't enough more "portable" over 17"(see sig again). i.e. the 8250 is really a move it somewhere and park it type of nb where I'd expect/hope that something like the w230st is really and truly "portable".

That said, I'm keeping the 8250 and waiting to see what temps turn out to be like on 7330s, esp. wingnuts as his is pretty closely specced to what I'd end up with.

 

They all come with a white backlit keyboard.

 

My friend told me I shouldn't get HDD on a laptop this size because the HDD would be too heavy, too loud, too hot, and too non-shock-tolerant.. should I listen to him and go SSD only on the W230ST?

 

Since there is room for both an 2x mSata and one 2.5" Sata HD, I'm going for one mSata SSD and a very large 2.5" HDD for extra storage. I think it's like a $10 option for a 1TB HDD. One thing to keep in mind with mSata, is be sure to get some kind of USB to mSata drive enclosure. This way, it the laptop becomes inoperable. You can always take the mSata drive out and maybe read the data onto another PC/Laptop.

 

HDD isn't too heavy or loud, but it is slower and less shock tolerant, but also much less expensive than an SSD. Faster HDD's can give some vibration depending on the HDD and construction of the laptop. I had one laptop years ago with a 7200RPM HDD that it numbed my hand from the vibration. It was a slight vibration, very quiet, but that slight vibration went right into my hand and put it to sleep.

That being said I wouldn't put any HDD in a laptop ever again mainly because the performance benefits are so phenomenally improved over a traditional HDD it's not even funny.

 

so, being the notebook newb that i am, i just recognized that msata utilizes an entirely different size device compared to sata.
i was planning on purchasing a w230st with a large capacity hdd, but it looks like that would defeat the purpose of my crucial m4 that it is sitting in my p150hm.

i do use an external hard drive at the moment, but i was definitely hoping to carry hdd/ssd in my w230st.
that put a minor dent in things. i still plan on getting the laptop though. wouldn't necessarily be awful to utilize it with just a 128gb ssd. been doing that with my p150hm the past two years anyhow.

are mythologic, lpc-digital, xoticpc and powernotebooks the only u.s. based clevo resellers?

one more thing:
of those four resellers, only mythologic's website provides the option of buying the laptop without a primary hard drive.

and it also says: (REQUIRES mSATA for Bootable Drive)
--> does that mean that i would still need to purchase an msata drive to boot up the laptop?
i was sort of pinning my hopes on the possibility of buying the laptop without any msata drives or primary drives.

 

So far I've found Mythlogic, XoticPC, LPC Digital, HID Evolution, RJ Tech, Power Notebooks, Ava Direct, Sager. Seems like prices are pretty even across the board. Myth's upgrades seem to be cheaper, and they include nice extras like monitor calibration. Xotic also offers some pretty nice extras. RJ Tech is the only place you can get it completely barebones. HID has the 4702 upgrade at no extra cost which is sweet if you're going that route.

If you find a vendor you like I'd call or chat with a sales rep and see if they can do some customizing for you regarding the hard drives.

 

]I OTOH never had ANY vibration problems with hdds, and GREATLY appreciate the cost/cap/longevity of hdds v. ssds.[EDIT] fans vibrate ore than the hdds... [/EDIT]

As a background this is the first nb(or any comp) that I've added ssd to. Boot time is MUCH quicker, but capacity is entirely lacking at reasonable prices/write cycles, adding to cost/cap argument I've never had any problems with "shock"(hell, the rest of the nb is pretty much as likely to be damaged as well).

As to USB enclosure, pretty much applies to ANY kind of drive as they generally ignore SMART/etc. I'd just hope to have time to low level dump an image of the drive before it completely failed.

i.e. SSDs are pretty useless to me given they are not at all geared to any high write(/erase) cycle activities, have high cost, and extremely limited in capacity, but I guess that it all comes down to how much storage you need and what you're willing to shell out. Personally I'm much happier at c. $120 for a 1TB 7mm hdd, etc. v. can't do that, but spend $1k and you can kinda get close... [EDIT] a c. $1-200 SSD seems to be reasonable for what amounts to a utility boot drive/light usage apps though... all my steam games are on the 1TB 7mm WD 5400RPM and I'm not at all noticing anything that I could attribute to load time lag...

I suppose a compromise MIGHT be a hybrid drive... maybe have to try one of those out if I end up ordering a 7330, which, yes I HAD considered going purely ssd but realize that's not gonna happen given cost/cap constraints... well cap rules it out entirely to be brutally honest even IF I were ignoring relative costs... [/EDIT]

 

Nothing wrong with traditional HDD's for storage. But for shock that doesn't necessarily mean hard impact, just jerking it around. And write cycles for SSD are not a concern at all. They will easily last 10-12 years minimum for a heavy consumer user. For a "regular" user they will last longer than you could ever use them. SSD's are expensive compared with HDD"s, but at least pricing has come down considerably, and IMHO are worth their cost. I just ran a "slow" Samsung (non Pro) 120GB SSD through torture testing and it has withstood over 200TB of writes so far. Write cycles are NOT a concern, period.

Time is money and less time waiting on the I/O of a storage disk is very important to me.

Crucial M500 960GB is $600. Almost to $0.50/GB. It's matching mobile hard drive capacity at the moment. This time next year we should see a plethora of 1TB SSD's at about $400. And with mSATA gaining popularity as well as reduced pricing, with comparable capacity and performance to the 2.5" brethren running two in RAID 0 offers a price advantage as well. Running two 256GB mSATA drives for $400 is 1.5 to 2x the performance of a single Samung 840 Pro 512GB costing $500.

I hate to say it but once you've gone SSD you never go back (to HDD).

 

I have to agree with most every this said here. I started using SSD back in like 2009 and ran three in RAID 0. I did have a few issues, but these were some of the 1st SSDs on the market. I have been running 2 (2010 vintage) Intel SSDs in RAID 0 for about 3 years now and just had a system crash. Not sure if it was the SSDs or just a corrupted WIN 7 install. I hammer my NP7280 pretty hard about 6-10 hours a day every day.

I do a lot of software development and my compile times are about 5-10 times faster. When you're compiling 10-50 times a day, that time adds up.

I like to run a combo of SSD and HDD. My current setup is 2x 160GB SSDs in RAID 0 for boot and source code and a 750GB HDD for content.

 

Unless you have very specific needs don't listen to the RAID0 whistles
It won't give you more performance (see RAID 0: Great For Benchmarks, Not So Much In The Real World)

What WILL be 2x for sure is power consumption. Also, it used to add load to the cpu (to handle repartition - not sure if the word is right nor if that work was relocated to the northbridge, but something has to do it in the end) and to I/O bus/chipset.

You'd be better off running them separately as JBOD, so that one can idle most of the time.
Even better with one single drive.

One thing about HDDs, while they're much better value for money as storage disks, you're not supposed to walk your laptop around if they're not parked (standby/sleep)

 

A thousand times this.

As anyone who's played with a gyro can attest to, rotating them such that you try to change the angle of the axis of rotation exerts large stresses on the bearings; coupled with copper's naturally soft and easily deformed state, it really doesn't take anywhere near as large a jolt with a reading arm active to cause a hard drive crash, as when the thing is parked or off.

There's a reason Thinkpad spent *sooooo* much $$$$$ on custom hard drives with freefall sensors way back when. It wasn't *all* wank.

 

This laptop has almost everything that I have been looking for. The only two issues that may prevent me from taking it are the possibly high temperature and the lack of fingerprint device.

Also, is the mSATA SSD as good as normal SSD? I already have a Samsung 840 pro 128GB, but if I put it in this laptop I won't have a place to put a HDD as storage disk.

 

I agree for performance reasons RAID 0 doesn't have its merits but for cost alone, two smaller disks can cost much less than a single SSD twice the size and you eliminate the bottleneck of the slower speeds of the smaller drives by striping the array. That's all. RAID won't add much stress to the CPU as it's all handled by the chipset, only software RAID done through Windows will stress the CPU. It isn't something for everyone, for certain, but your every day user can make use of a single SSD no problem and highly recommended. As far as storage, for games, music, video, etc, HDD will work fine. And power consumption at idle is minimal for SSD's. Since they complete the work very quickly, in work power isn't as much of a consideration on battery, and the fact that you won't or shouldn't be doing CPU or I/O intensive tasks on battery.

 

Yes, mSATA drives are equivalent to 2.5" SSDs in terms of performance.

Don't bother with your Samsung 840 SSD. 128GB is far too little space to put into a machine with an mSATA slot. What you want is a 256GB mSATA SSD (about $200), and a 1TB 5400rpm mechanical drive in the 2.5" SATA bay

 

128GB is perfectly adequate for some users, depending on use case. Hell, just having your OS and most-used 2 or 3 programs on an SSD and keeping your data on a network share might be enough. And with a Clevo, it's always easy to upgrade later. That big mSATA SSD you're recommending isn't going to get *more* expensive, y'know...

 

What I mean is... Putting a 128gb 2.5" SSD in a system with an mSATA slot is a waste. Because once you do that, the most storage you are realistically going to have in that system is 128GB.

You want your SSD on your mSATA slot, and a gigantic slow 5400rpm mechanical HDD in your SATA slot. This configuration will get you 1TB+ of local storage in your system. And it isn't really all that expensive. A 256Gb mSATA SSD is only about $200 (only a $50 premium over a comparable 2.5" SSD equivalent) and a 1TB 2.5" HDD is under $100. So we're talking about $300 at most, to absolutely max out your storage options in both speed and storage capacity.

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD using Tapatalk 2

 

Actually, that's what *you* want, and that doesn't mean everybody does, or should...

I, for one, am going for all-SSD in my laptop.
I love my HDDs, but for all the reasons stated here today (and probably some more), they are going to stay in my static apparatuses (desktops/NAS/whatnot).

 

I don't know for USA, but here in France this is not usually true, as an example:
Crucial M500 - 120 Go - 114 €
Crucial M500 - 240 Go - 190 €
Crucial M500 - 480 Go - 370 €

Same conclusion as on the article I posted, you pretty much only improve sequential R/W, and those are NOT the bottlenecks for typical daily usage.

Unless something has dramatically changed over the past 10 years (yeah that's really possible I know ), it IS actually (semi) software RAID.
I used to RAID my HDDs back then, it was already "handled" (read: "supported") by the chipset, which meant drivers (thus, CPU) were doing the job.
Only RAID pro-cards were handling all by themselves (dedicated processor), and I do believe this is still the case.
The load won't be high of course (it was like 10 - 20% on those athlon 1ghz CPU so..) but it still adds to the workload !

I usually do what I need to do on battery, not what I "should" be doing =)
Typical usage scenario: bittorent running. Another one: long copies or backup from another computer or external HDD.
Twice the consumption.. again, it won't remove that much to your autonomy, but since those laptops don't last long on battery it's nice to squeeze the max out of them don't you think ?

 

Pricing here is pretty linear, but the point that you can get faster performance coupling two 128GB than a single 256GB drive is all the point I was trying to make. I was just giving a usage scenario. For most users RAID is hardly important and they would benefit more and with less risk using a single SSD over two.

There is big difference in performance and CPU usage between chipset RAID and Windows RAID. The "hardware" RAID uses significantly less resources than if you were to set up a RAID within Windows. And I know chipset RAID isn't a true hardware RAID, as true hardware controlled RAID cards in desktops can start at $500+. But the chipset RAID is much more optimized than any software (i.e. Windows) RAID.

You can do whatever you want to on battery. Just that most users want more battery life and doing anything resource intensive will drain the battery quickly, and you'll get best performance on mains anyhow. CPU speed is gimped, I/O is gimped, GPU is gimped all when on battery, so performance in general will be much less. And relying on battery when doing large data transfers is a bad idea imho.

It's entirely up to the user how they want to set up their system. Some want more battery life, some just want to be able to be unplugged for 30 minutes, whatever your needs, at least with this laptop you have a nice set of storage options with support for up to three drives in such a small package gives users lots of possible solutions.

 

Well this is also what I aim for in a long term plan. But given that I have a tight budget, I might stick with mSATA SSD + HDD storage for now.

 

I agree with this. The point about the value is valid, but I already have a nice SSD that I bought not long ago, and my local storage needs aren't great, so that works for me. In the future I can upgrade and give the SSD to my brother or something.

 

I have been traveling with laptops, for over 10 years, to many offshore locations via helicopter and dealing with "gorilla" baggage handlers.

A parked hard drive was never a problem included portable drives dropped on anti static rubber floors. I need large capacity drives, not just an OS and a game or two. I will image two 500G drives that cost next to nothing compared to SSD drives during the last three years. I enjoy high frame rates more than quick booting

All this, drool, will be changing as the prices for SSD drives drop even lower. While there are some users that scream reliability is not a problem, searching thru these forums suggest otherwise with drive controllers being biggest culprit. Did I not read Intel would never use Sandforce controllers?

So, my point is the prices are dropping and the technology is improving to the point that SSD will be first choice, no?

 

Are you sure ?? Even on "performance" setting ?
Feels strange and useless to me, I didn't bench to compare but never noticed that..

Well, if you only have 8% battery left, I can understand, otherwise I don't see a problem here, and never encountered one.
I do this all the time.. I'm not scared to use a laptop on battery, or I would have kept my shuttle xpc

Well, I think we agreed that RAID should not be displayed as the way to go for most users, as it started to look like a few posts above (not in yours), which made me react.

 

This is my configuration for my laptop thats on order.

128 Msata for windows 8
128 Msata for Linux (Manjaro Cinnamon x64)
750 Seagate Hybrid formatted in NTFS

The Hybrid drives gives a great benefit for the most common used applications at start up. (steam in my case)
It also give me plenty of room to keep my movies/files/and single player games.

SSD are fast and all but in GAMING they mainly benefit MMO's sinlge player games dont see a BIG enough improvement. Just keep your MMO on your Msata drives.

Thats my 2 cents.

 

Yes, the vast majority of today's notebooks will not run at peak performance on battery due to battery constraints. A quad core Haswell with a GTX 765M will draw roughly 100-110 watts when both components are loaded in most gaming scenarios. The battery supplied with the W230ST is only rated for 62 watts, so the BIOS will force both components to downclock to prevent overloading the battery.

 

Speaking of battery life, does anybody know how long this will/might last on the IGP, on power saver mode, WiFi off, minimal screen brightness, and doing only word processing/taking notes? Just need to know if this will last through a three hour lecture

 

Just a minor note. The 62 Whr is watt-hour and is not a maximum power rating, but an endurance rating meaning that it can provide 62W of power at the specified voltage for 1 hour. There is usually a maximum current rate the battery can provide which can be used to calculate the maximum power.

 

This exactly. All the components are gimped on battery to prevent overloading the battery. No matter what power setting you use. CPU will be limited to likely 1GHz or 1.2GHz, GPU will be limited to the mid-performance frequencies, and I/O will also be reduced. It's built into the system and in most cases no way around it.

3hrs? This I can guarantee you and haven't even touched the laptop yet. It should last 5 hours with wi-fi on power saver mode and 20-30% brightness.

 

As I've learned from the R/C hobby and car audio, maximum rating is not as significant as continuous rating. What good does it do if a battery is rated for 74Whr peak when it can only sustain such figures for less than an hour? Same thing applies for power supplies, especially when you have to take AC to DC conversion loss into consideration. That 120 watt that this notebook's power supply draws from the outlet may in fact be actually providing 100-105 watts to the notebook.

 

Don't forget battery safety and internal temp monitoring limits max draw.

Like the RC stuff my heli 450 LiPos have smoked several times, will give you 60 amps for all of 6 minutes and won't last a year..

 

All this stands, but I don't see how any of it is related to your original incorrect statement

 

Which is? The battery is an 11.1v 5600 mAh unit.

 

Most notebook batteries don't quite a peak power as they are designed to provide enough for the system at peak mobile loads (this usually involves the graphics card not being fully clocked) however if you do manage to go over this the EC will shut down.

 

Exactly, and that doesn't mean that 62W is the maximum power output as you stated.

 

Not trying to be a pessimist, but how would this benefit us? If Clevo intended to use a battery rated at 62.1Whr, then surely they will 'gate' it at that level to protect the battery. Regardless of how much the battery can actually tolerate, the system will not go past this level as Meaker stated.

 

Again, this is not related to your wrong statement. Maybe they will limit the maximum CPU and GPU draw on battery power to aim lower than 62W, maybe to more than that.

But, enough of this. I agreed with your post and just commented on the incorrect/misleading thing you've stated.

 

Hmm why not just draw out your notebook and try benchmarking it on battery and then on PSU (with the same setting in power management for both cases) ? I think that will simplify the discussion .

 

I know what you are trying to do, and you're trying to nitpick something that is neither relevant or isn't even there.

Back on topic, Pro Star posted a video of the W230ST benchmarking, and also gives an idea of the screen's viewing angles.


@ 0:35, Unigine Heaven seems to be stuttering on battery, so the GPU is definitely downclocked.

 

LOL, you're funny. You posted this " The battery supplied with the W230ST is only rated for 62 watts, so the BIOS will force both components to downclock to prevent overloading the battery." which is not correct as the maximum battery power output can be lower or higher than that and you can't deduce that from the capacity and voltage. There was nothing offensive in my post, but you keep making some excuses and now suddenly "You know what I'm trying to do" here? Whatever..

 

you two should take a look at the latest XKCD comic (#1238)

 

The WHr rating of the battery had nothing to do with peak battery output. It is simply how much energy is stored.

Sent from my YP-G70 using Tapatalk 2

 

It's usually around 70-80W draw max.

 

I hope my laptop ships today! I would love to get my hands on it before this weekend! I got my mSATA SSD yesterday in the mail (Intel 525 240GB) and I am ready now for the rest of this beast to arrive

 

Nice choice on the mSATA 525, you getting a data drive too or is 240GB going to be enough for you?

 

So I want to get this from RJTech but without an HDD, RAM and a wireless card. This is the wireless card I currently own and I would like to know if it is compatible with the W230ST:

Intel 6200: Amazon.com : Intel 6200 IEEE 802.11n (draft) Wi-Fi Adapter - Mini PCI Express - 300Mbps : Desktop Computer Network Cards : Electronics

Also, how good is it? Thanks

 

CPU can be easily unthrottle with throttlestop, but gpu is another story.