For the last month I started to have a big problem with the speed of my notebook (X301). Every time Windows wrote data to the swap the whole computer froze up for 10 to 60 seconds. Since this happened very often, working with the computer more and more got a pain in the a… I knew that this problem was most likely because of the SSD and it’s lack of TRIM. After all, it is one of the early models.
Even though I was not convinced that Lenovo would actually admit this to be a support issue, because it is easy to stretch an argument about new installing Windows and so on, I finally called Lenovo Support two days ago.
The support person was not very enthusiastic about his job and, me only describing the symptoms as being a user, followed his guide book of how to deal with customers and their problems. Funnily he did not even ask my Serial number nor did he ask me for my notebook model number. Happy to have a solution for me, he sent me a mail with links to some diagnostic tool I was supposed to run.
Of cause I was not too amused by this answer but kept quiet and ran the tests yesterday. Of cause there was not problem besides the HDD Active Protection Sensor, which did not seem to get all the required data. I do not think that this really is the problem of the disk. As you must know, SSDs specially without TRIM suffer from a severe problem: since they mark their storage cells as written after data was once written to them, every time they want to write more data into these cells, they first have to read them. This obviously slows the write process down dramatically. The job of TRIM is to delete this marking as son as the filesystem signals that the data is deleted. This is crucial to understand, because normally the harddrive does not know or care about higher levels such as the filesystem and therefore could never react to delete.
Anyway, The benchmark tool of the diagnostic showed a transfer rate of only 10 MB/s, which is as fast as normal harddrives were ages ago. I ran another benchmark test in Windows afterwards that showed even worse performance of only about 5MB/s write speed.
So, I wrote a short mail to the support about my observations and hoped for the best.
Today I received a mail with the note that a new harddrive is already sent to me.
Wow… That was fast.