http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/Need-to-Repave-my-W520-with-Windows-7-Ultimate-Use-Vanilla/td-p/439787

I finally got home from a long week of travel, did a full backup of my computer just in case the registry hack failed, and applied the registry fix discussed in the article here:  http://geekmontage.com/texts/ocz-vertex-3-freezes-locks-up-stutters-and-crashes/.

I can say, after using the computer for a few hours, I have not had one hickup.  I’m hoping it stays that way.  For anyone else who thinks they have the same problem, here are some of the issues I was having:

1. W520 would boot slowly and about 1 out of 5 times hang forever after reaching the logged in screan (wait cursor when hovering over startbar)
2. Outlook would hang in the middle of typing messages, often for more than a minute
3. Eventlog errors referring to location iaStor
4. Visual Studio 2010 would get really slow and hang
5. Many others

Here is what my current stats look like.  This is a newer version of CrystalDiskMark so it may not be comparable to the previous version I ran.

For the moment, I’m a happy camper.

Let me get the fireworks out of the way first so you don’t need to wait for the numbers

OCZ Technology 240 GB Vertex 3 SATA III 6.0 Gb/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive VTX3-25SAT3-240G: Electronics

For those that don’t know what these numbers represent, let me tell you, this is a screamer!  The W520 actually supports the SATA III interface spec which goes up 600MB.  I was wondering if it would actually work and I have to say, if it’s showing Sequential reads of 472.2 MB/second, it must be working.  The drive holds 240Gig and currently costs about $600.

In contrast, the drive I had before in my Lenovo W520 was no slouch.  It was a 256Gig Patriot Torqx M28.  The numbers are below run from the same Lenovo W520 computer.

Patriot Memory 256 GB 2.5-Inch Torqx Solid-State Drive PTX256GS25SSDR: Electronics

Just by way of comparison to a rotating disk, my configuration in the Lenovo W520 is I put my boot drive (the SSD) in the slot normally used by the DVD and I put my data disk (mydoc’s, etc.) where the normal built in disk goes.  I’ve got a 750GB Hitachi drive that simply rotates platters around (but costs less than $100).  The numbers are not quite as impressive.

Seagate Momentus 7200 500GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 16MB Cache 2.5 Inch Internal NB Hard Drive ST9500420AS-Bare Drive: Electronics

And for those of you that like graphs, here is the Sequential Read Speed by Drive

And a computer very similar to mine:

I’m hooked, hope are also now.  Hard to go back to read and write speeds of .5 MB/second.

I recently notice on Amazon a discussion thread of about 15 people saying how absolutely wonderful SSDs are and how the brought new life to their notebook computers.  Every one of them raved about the magic this brought into their lives.

Well, after checking out the prices and performance, it seems that right now there are two classes of these drives.  It seems there is a first generation drive that performs in the area of 15/40Mbs/sec and ones that perform in the 100/170Mbs/sec.  To put this in perspective, when people refer to SATA/150 or SATA/300, the 150 and 300 are the Mbs/sec.  With Vista resource manager, you can actually see for yourself how man Mbs/sec you are actually getting.  Below is a screen shot showing that.

The price point for a 64Gig SSD which performs in the faster category is now about $150.  Off to the computer store I went to get mine.  The one I bought is a Patriot Warp as shown below.

What Happened

So, I get home and immediately put this new drive in my computer and since I now only have 64Gig for my system ( C ) drive, I need to load Vista Business on my Lenovo W500 from scratch (see description at bottom of page).

Immediately, I noticed it booted faster and shutdown faster.  This in fact was power of suggestion because when I looked at the numbers, it really did not boot much faster.  Here is the comparison.

Well, then things really began to fall apart.  It normally takes me a while to load all my different software programs.  Usually I can work at the same time as I’m installing software (most of my software I have ISO’s for so I don’t need to mess with DVDs).  It usually slows me down, but not too bad.  I quickly found that on this SSD, while software was installing, all I could do was wait.  If I tried to do anything else, the computer just slowed to a crawl.

In disbelief, I kept going down this path thinking it was all my imagination and that things were fine and fast.  I even convinced myself this was normal.  Finally, when installing one of my packages from Microsoft I got a failure.  I decided, since I really needed this software I should see if it’s the SSD drive causing the problem.

Next thing I did was to make an image backup with my favorite software (Acronis, see link below), then restore the SSD data to my WD 7200RPM basic rotating drive.  Well, to my total surprise, everything is now fast again and the Microsoft software actually installed no problem.

Conclusion

Wait for the next generation of SSD’s to come out.  This generation just does not work for me.  Thank goodness for 15 day return policies!

Hardware and Software Used