Good news for Latitude X1 owners!

Ivar and everyone else - I apologize for the incorrectness of the prior posting. I was looking at the X1 internals and assumed that the connector on the motherboard was the same as the ZIF 50 pin cable as you showed in the ebay posting (the same cable and size as on the ZIF hard drive). My post was premature and after checking, it in fact is NOT the same cable and cannot work as I mentioned. I ended up using the converter board on ebay. It is a tight fit, but it does fit inside the X1. I used the converter with a Mtron MOBI 3000 32gb SSD 1.8" drive. The drive and converter board fits into the X1 just fine but it is a very tight squeeze. I needed to position everything around carefully and pack the cables inside, then set the keyboard on top and put it back together. After I put it all together though, the keyboard does not stick up at all (OK maybe it sticks up HALF of 1 mm at most, but I cannot tell if it does at all and I am very particular about my laptops). So I am glad that everything fits in and works very well. The SSD works VERY fast, feels like it is faster a 7200rpm drive because of very low latency. The only drawback is the size as it is only 32gb.

I use a 32gb CF card and also a SD card in the readers in order to store files, so I find that I have more than enough storage space thankfully. Again, the only drawback is that the CF card read/write speeds are VERY slow. I belive this to be a limitation of the X1's Ricoh controller chip, because I tested the card's speed with HDTune on a different laptop with an external reader and it was MUCH faster. I tried various drivers with the X1's Ricoh controller chip but none will work any better. The card is only rated to run at PIO mode 4, but the X1 cannot even meet those speeds. So, that is the only drawback of this laptop right now, is that the CF card reader allows us to store up to 32gb right now, but it is VERY slow (thankfully fast enough to view a DIVX movie, but barely). HDTune test results that I get with the CF card are only 1mb/sec.

Also another thing I tested is that the SD card reader will in fact support SDHC cards, so that allows us even more storage capacity. The caveat is that it won't support the 16gb SDHC cards. I tested 4gb and 8gb cards, and even a 16gb card. The 16gb card is detected and seems to work, but when you try and read/write, it fails. Too bad. But 8gb SDHC cards seem to work well. So right now even though my 32gb SSD doesnt have that much storage space, I have an 8gb SDHC and 32gb CF card to supplement it, so in total I have 32gb hard drive + 32gb CF + 8gb SD = 72gb total available. The SD card reader by the way, works MUCH faster than the CF card reader, so its better for larger files or things that need faster storage. HDTune testing on the SD card reader shows about 5-6mb/sec, and much less CPU usage as well.

Again, sorry everyone for the premature post about the ZIF cables and the false hope that I gave out, but I hope this post makes up for it and helps all the X1 owners out there.

 

X1 is not affected. They are made for Dell by Samsung, so there are no sony batteries there.

channelv,

Thanks for new portion of very useful information. It helped me to
decide not to hunt for 32GB SD cards, and for particularly speedy CF ones.

 

Could you post IOmeter benchmarks with mtron ssd and possibly with the memory cards?

Something like 4kb and 1mb 100% random reads and writes.

 

Thanks for the update. I've been waiting for the right moment to pry the X1 back out of my wife's hands to dive back inside but now I don't have to. One more thing off my to do list!

I have an off topic question for you X1 gurus. The wireless seems a bit slow, the best I'm able to get is 54 Mbps with the X1 sitting on the router. The router is a Belkin pre-n and has been fine with other laptops. Unfortunately I don't have another wireless handy to compare and I don't remember what speed she used to get. I did a clean install and am using the windows XP native drivers (hate to install apps if they're not needed). I did a search of the forums and wasn't able to find anything about the X1 wireless... any thoughts?

Thanks!

 

Hi Channelv.

I have followed this thread some months now and I'm still not sure what SSD to buy to my X1 laptop.
It seems like I can buy any ZIF-controlled SSD and make it work with a 'converter board on ebay'. You mentioned though, that I should not buy a Samsung SSD because of the ATA33/100 problem.

I know that i can buy the Mtron MOBI 3000 32gb, but is it also safe to buy this one: TRANSCEND TS8GIFD18 - Internal hard drive (SSD) 8GB ? (even though it's not a ZIF-connector)
The price for the Mtron MOBI SSD is £156 - I would maybe be looking for at cheaper SSD if there's one out there. Can any 1.8" ZIF-SSD be used? And is 32GB still the largest SSD on the market?

The last thing I don't know is, what adapter should i buy? There's a lot of 'converter board on ebay' but which one is the right one, if I buy the Mtron SSD 32GB?


Regards Rune.
Denmark.

 

Ivar, even if you do get a fast CF card, I think the speed will still be limited because the CF reader in the X1 is poor and outdated. However, that all might change if you get a CF card capable of UDMA/UATA33. The 32gb CF card I have only supports up to PIO mode 4, but it still should be faster than the poor benchmark scores and real world usage that it affords.

 

I only need a name of any ZIF-converter / cable that works, for the X1 to this disk: MTRON MOBI 3000 32GB 1.8" ZIF IDE SSD.
Would Ivar or channelv supply me with one? Please.

 

The X1 comes with (usually) the Intel Pro/2200BG mini PCI card. This wireless card works just fine for me with great signal and fast speeds. I also use it with an N router (although a higher end Trendnet TEW-633GR). If you are getting slow speeeds and dropped signal with the latest intel drivers, make sure you update the firmware on your router itself. Windows Update (at least in Vista) has the latest drivers for that wireless card. Otherwise, download it from Intel.com

 

Yes. Do not get Samsung SSDs because the only operate at DMA66 speeds which the X1 won't support - thus it will revert to DMA33 and hinder it significantly. Even for my Mtron SSD, it was made to run up to ATA7 speeds but the chipset in the X1 only supports up to ATA6 (100mhz rather than 133mhz), so I think that performance is still not as good as it could be. I am posting HDTune results later tonite, so watch for them!! Samsung has 64gb 1.8" SSDs but again they are hampered by their slow controller. I wouldn't use the Transcend 8gb one either (I believe this is the one on newegg currently) for two reasons: the performance is very poor and also the interface is different so I'm not sure how you would hook it up. Finally, yes - any PATA ZIF ssd can be used with the correct coverter board (the one IVAR linked to that you can get easily on ebay).

 

OK Everyone, here is what you've been waiting for:

HDTune results on my Mtron MOBI 3000 PATA 32gb SLC SSD drive. Screenshots below are attached. Mtron's website states up to 100mb sustained read AND write speeds, but with HDTune, I pulled up only about 70ish (which I'm not complaining about). The MTron manual even states that intel chipsets such as the one in the X1 do not support ATA mode 7 and thus you may see slightly reduced performance. But no complaints here, and there is no stuttering as people have mentioned with other SSDs (like OCZ core series and others). It is also worth mentioning that I had a Ridata 16gb SLC SSD in this laptop prior to putting in the Mtron. It performed about 10-20mb/s slower in the HDTune tests, but was still very fast and was compatible and running at full ATA100 speeds (I don't remember the numbers but I think minimum transfers were around 40 something mb/s while maximum topped out at about 60 - still a fast drive).


Also for kicks, I included the HDTune results of a Samsung 32gb CF card in the compact flash card reader just to show you how slow it is. I am almost positive this is a limitation of the reader itself in the laptop. If anyone discovers drivers that improve this or a card that works well in the X1, let us know!!