Half a year ago, I reported that I had to find a
replacement
for my trusty old Thinkpad X41. Unfortunately I did not have much
time to spend on it, and it took a while to find a model I believe
will do the job, but two days ago the replacement finally arrived. I
ended up picking a
Thinkpad X230
with SSD disk (NZDAJMN). I first test installed Debian Edu Wheezy as
a roaming workstation, and it seemed to work flawlessly. But my
second installation with encrypted disk was not as successful. More
on that below.
I had a hard time trying to track down a good laptop, as my most
important requirements (robust and with a good keyboard) are never
listed in the feature list. But I did get good help from the search
feature at Prisjakt, which
allowed me to limit the list of interesting laptops based on my other
requirements. A bit surprising that SSD disk are not disks according
to that search interface, so I had to drop specifying the number of
disks from my search parameters. I also asked around among friends to
get their impression on keyboards and robustness.
So the new laptop arrived, and it is quite a lot wider than the
X41. I am not quite convinced about the keyboard, as it is
significantly wider than my old keyboard, and I have to stretch my
hand a lot more to reach the edges. But the key response is fairly
good and the individual key shape is fairly easy to handle, so I hope
I will get used to it. My old X40 was starting to fail, and I really
needed a new laptop now. :)
Turning off the touch pad was simple. All it took was a quick
visit to the BIOS during boot it disable it.
But there is a fatal problem with the laptop. The 180 GB SSD disk
lock up during load. And this happen when installing Debian Wheezy
with encrypted disk, while the disk is being filled with random data.
I also tested to install Ubuntu Raring, and it happen there too if I
reenable the code to fill the disk with random data (it is disabled by
default in Ubuntu). And the bug with is already known. It was
reported to Debian as BTS
report #691427 2012-10-25 (journal commit I/O error on brand-new
Thinkpad T430s ext4 on lvm on SSD). It is also reported to the Linux
kernel developers as
Kernel bugzilla
report #51861 2012-12-20 (Intel SSD 520 stops working under load
(SSDSC2BW180A3L in Lenovo ThinkPad T430s)). It is also reported on the
Lenovo forums, both for
T430
2012-11-10 and for
X230
03-20-2013. The problem do not only affect installation. The
reports state that the disk lock up during use if many writes are done
on the disk, so it is much no use to work around the installation
problem and end up with a computer that can lock up at any moment.
There is even a
small C program
available that will lock up the hard drive after running a few
minutes by writing to a file.
I've contacted my supplier and asked how to handle this, and after
contacting PCHELP Norway (request 01D1FDP) which handle support
requests for Lenovo, his first suggestion was to upgrade the disk
firmware. Unfortunately there is no newer firmware available from
Lenovo, as my disk already have the most recent one (version LF1i). I
hope to hear more from him today and hope the problem can be
fixed. :)
