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February 26, 2008
The Sexy Laptop? - Move Over MacBook Air
Rob Enderle, president of Enderle Group and a well known and respected technologist had this to say about the new super lightweight laptop from Lenovo:
"It's the first ThinkPad since the mid-'90s that I actually think is sexy," he added. "Thinkpads are known as solid products, but not really for being sexy. It's just very thin, very light. It's kind of a technology showcase. This thing has all the bells and whistles that you could possibly aspire to in a notebook."
I can't say that I've ever heard that adjective used to describe computer hardware, but hey, to each his own :-).
Weighing in at under 3 lbs. it sports a 64GB Solid State Disk. To keep that SSD in top form, Lenovo chose to include Diskeeper software as part of the pre-install. Lenovo testing showed that only Diskeeper, with some special changes, could keep that SSD optimized.
Find the full system specs here.
I'm just wondering - does that qualify Diskeeper as "sexy software"?
Posted by Michael at February 26, 2008 10:27 PM
Comments
Hi Michael,
I was under the impression that defragmenting a SSD/flash memory device is detrimental since these things have a limited number of write cycles. Besides, since a SSD already has low seek times and latency, and doesn't have moving components, how will it benefit from defragmenting?
Posted by: Mentos at March 4, 2008 05:22 AM
Hi "Freshmaker"? :-)
Good questions - thanks for writing in.
Excessive writes certainly are detrimental. We have and are continuing to innovate Flash performance technologies which specifically accomodate NAND limitations.
As you noted, Flash does not incur the same mechanical limitations of magentic platter media but it still suffers from fragmentation - in some unique ways. We will be publishing studies later this year (as will other independant test groups). Sorry for the limited detail at this time, hopefully these reports will be public in Q2, 2008.
Posted by: Michael at March 13, 2008 10:40 PM
I have one of these "sexy" laptops and it's excellent.
I'm trying to upgrade to Diskeeper Pro but I can't figure out what version I have on the X300. In the upper left hand corner it says, helpfully, "Diskeeper" ... that's it! Any idea?
Interested to find out more when you write on fragging on SSD's also.
Duncan
Posted by: Duncan at March 22, 2008 02:47 AM
That product is Diskeeper 9.0 Home Edition.
Posted by: Michael at March 26, 2008 07:48 PM
To 'Mentos':
IMO, the speed in which files are read from an SSD probably won't be noticeably affected even if the files are heavily fragmented.
Where it would most definitely make a difference is when the amount of consolidated free space on an SSD isn't large enough to accommodate the writing of a file, without splitting it up into multiple fragments.
This would decrease performance because SSDs aren't nearly as fast with random write performance, than with sequential writes.
Of course the SSD firmware/software driver must be optimized to try its best to write files sequentially onto the memory --> (IE: the file placement that the operating systems sees on the filesystem of that drive is just a mask that the firmware/software driver provides, the firmware/software driver would have its own plan for file placement, either with a mask thus leaving the OS out of the decision making, or working with the NTFS filesystem driver or something like that.)
Posted by: Danwat1234_how do I create new lines in my post? Grrrr. LessThan_BR_GreaterThan doesn't work. at April 1, 2008 10:31 PM
So using Diskeeper to move all the data to one area of the SSD, so that the consolidated free space is as large as possible, and the SSD manufacturer uses some techniques to make sure that files are written sequential to the disk rather than randomly as much as possible, would provide the best write performance. These 'Techniques' would also provide wear leveling.
Also keep in mind that de-fragmenting files (along with consolidating free space) helps with professional data recovery if the SSD stops working.
Posted by: Danwat1234 _how do I create new lines in my post? Grrrr. Lessthan_BR_Greaterthan doesn't work. at April 1, 2008 10:42 PM