ADATA XM13: Shopping for mSata SSD

Purchased Newegg.com - ADATA XM13 AXM13S2-60GM-C mSATA 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) just before they ran out of stock. Made my decision mainly based on this review NVELO Dataplex SSD Caching Software Review - Seven mSATA SSDs Prove An Amazing Concept - The SSD Review. It had good performance scores and a relatively affordable price. I was also considering MyDigital 64GB SSD and Kingston mS100, but ADATA seems to beat them in performance.

Is anybody using that ADATA in their Ideapads? There isn't much information available about it, positive or negative. Adata seems to be fairly new on the market, and I hope they won't go bankrupt anytime soon.

 

I also have the XM13 60gb. I get my y470 in a week so I can't test the SSD...

Thanks for that review. I searched a lot without finding anything relevant on this SSD. I bought it because it seemed like a good value, but overall I didn't actually know what speeds to expect.

 

So, a little update. Today I've recieved my new mSata SSD and the laptop. Had to actually go to UPS myself for a laptop pick up, since they are terrible at delivery

Didn't expect mSata to be so tiny in comparison to a regular 2.5 inch SSD. Installation went smooth, thankfully you just have to undo one screw on a tiny cover. One problem I ran into is the fact that SSD didn't come with an extra screw to secure it when it's plugged in. My old calculator had to pay the price for it.

Afterwards, I formatted the drives because of the bloatware and weird partitions, then made a clean Windows 7 Professional installation on the SSD. After lenovo optimization my boot time ranges from 9 to 10 seconds. I have around 38GB to spare before driver installations, which is enough room for me to fit all essential programs. Overall I'm a happy camper right now.

 

Nice. What drivers did you use for the mSATA? Windows AHCI or Intel Rapid Storage?

The MyDigitalSSD in my laptop is unimpressive. Somethings are quicker, but many times if I am downloading a large file, everything comes to a halt until the download finishes. Also my boot times are mid 20s. Just not what I was hoping for. Glad to see your success.

 

I just use the stock lenovo drivers from their website, I think it's Intel.

With more services running at startup my boot time increased to 13-15s on high performance, about 23 seconds on super energy saver mode. Looking into disabling some stuff I don't need.

 

So to put some solid numbers behind the claims, I'll provide some benchmarks and temps. With a fresh Win 7 install and just a part of the drivers loaded, it was booting up in 9-10 seconds. However, with all the devices working and some programs loading on start up, it slowed down to 14-16 seconds on average.

Temperatures do concern me. It runs at 45-50C without load and gets as hot as 70C with CrystalDiskMark. I thought that no moving parts would mean less of an increase in temps, so now I'm not too eager to stress test it further.

I ran a boot speed race to the desktop screen with everything loaded and opening Firefox/OpenOffice between my laptop and desktop with 2500K processor and Crucial M4 64GB Sata III SSD. The laptop won by about 2-3 seconds. Mostly it was due to the shorter pause between the BIOS screen and loading OS, I was impressed nevertheless.

You can compare the CrystalDiskMark results to $20 cheaper myDigital 64GB mSata SSD:

Spoiler

_________________Adata XM13____________________________________ MyDigitalSSD 64GB_______________

If someone has Kingston mS100 mSata SSD, I'd also love to see the results for a comparison. It also costs around $100.

P.S. I also have a friend with an identical laptop without SSD and will try to ask him to check his boot time to provide a fair comparison of SSD benefits.