Six hears ago, IBM released the best portable laptop I’ve ever used. The ThinkPad X40.

It was only about 2 and a half pounds, quite fast (especially at the time), had a full sized keyboard with a 12.1 inch display.

It had only one weakness. Its pathetic 4200RPM HDD. A drive that has definitely not aged well.

I benchmarked it the other day:

ThinkPad X40’s original 4200 RPM drive.

Ignore the burst speed. Look at the average read speed. 6.6 MB/sec.  Let me put that in perspective, a desktop PC from the same era could expect to do around 40 MB/sec.  That’s 6X faster.

Obviously, today, that speed is really embarrassing and more specifically, it makes an otherwise highly useful laptop useless because if you want to use even remotely new software, it just takes forever to deal with (not to mention, picture dealing with virtual memory on such a machine).

So I’m putting in my new SSD drive tonight.

Update....

Here is the ThinkPad X40 updated with a SSD:

53 MB/sec.

Now, that may not seem that fast but remember, the limiting factor here (Besides the fact that it's not even SATA but rather PATA) is the CPU. 

We're talking an instant 8X faster experience.  So instead of taking 240 seconds to boot (4 minutes) it would boot in 30 seconds.

Except it's actually better than that because of the random access time of 0.2ms vs 61ms.  Or put another way, random seek went form being nearly a 10th of a second to instantly. 

Net result, instead of it taking 5 minutes to boot it now takes 10 seconds in real world conditions. It's now a very usable netbook type device except the upgrade only cost $100 or so.