Disk Benchmarks
Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is the latest industry-standard software interface for PCIe SSDs. NVMe enables drives to benefit from the same “pool” of lanes that directly connect to the CPU. PCIe 4.0 drives can offer in excess of 7,000MB/s reads and 6,500MB/writes (with very large files). We don’t find this technology on refurbished machines. But even with the older PCIe technology, we can get read speeds in excess of 3,000MB/s and write speeds over 2,000MB/s.
You can see a clear difference in performance when you use NVMe, with a read/write throughput far higher than the hard drives and slower SATA SSDs also lagging somewhat behind. But it’s not always a huge difference.
The T470 has an NVMe but its performance is not great by current standards.
The GNOME Disks benchmark, of course, is a synthetic throughput that rarely corresponds with reality.
We wanted to verify the GNOME Disks tests. We therefore performed an extra disk speed test with dd. Note that we are using a blocksize of 1 MiB (whereas the GNOME Disks test is using a different sample size).
$ sync; dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024; sync
$ sudo /sbin/sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3
$ dd if=tempfile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
The chart below shows the findings (the test on each machine was run 5 times).
We didn’t test write speed. Remember, you cannot unmount a filesystem that’s in use. And the GNOME Disks write benchmark is destructive.
Specifications
| Lenovo ThinkPad T470 | 12th Gen Intel PC | 10th Gen Intel PC | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Laptop | Desktop PC | Desktop PC |
| Processor | Intel Core i5-6300U 2.40GHz (Turbo 3.00GHz) 2 cores 4 threads | Intel Core i5-12400F 2.50GHz (Turbo 4.4 GHz) 6 cores 12 threads | Intel Core i5-10400 2.90GHz (Turbo 4.30GHz) 6 cores 12 threads |
| Chipset | Intel Skylake | Intel Alder Lake | Intel Comet Lake |
| Memory | 8GB DDR4 (2133 MHz) | 16GB DDR4 (3200 MHz) | 32GB DDR4 (2666 MHz) |
| Graphics | Intel HD Graphics 520 | Asus NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti | Intel UHD Graphics 630 |
| Disk | 256GB Intel NVMe | 1TB Samsung 980 NVMe 2TB Crucial SSD | 1TB Corsair MP400 NVMe |
| EliteDesk 800 G2 | Lenovo M93 | AWOW AK41 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Tiny Desktop PC | Tiny Desktop PC | Mini PC |
| Processor | Intel i5-6500T 2.50 GHz (Turbo 3.10 GHz) 4 cores and 4 threads | Intel i5-4590T 2.00 GHz (Turbo 3.00 GHz) 4 cores and 4 threads | Intel Celeron J4115 1.80GHz (Turbo 2.5 GHz) 4 cores and 4 threads |
| Chipset | Intel Skylake | Intel Haswell | Intel Gemini Lake |
| Memory | 16GB DDR3 (2133 MHz) | 16GB DDR3 (1600 MHz) | 8GB DDR4 (2133 MHz) |
| Graphics | Intel HD Graphics 530 | Intel HD Graphics 4600 | Intel UHD Graphics 605 |
| Disk | 256GB Samsung NVMe SSD | 240GB Crucial SSD | 128GB Foresee NVMe SSD |
| AWOW NYI3 | Gigabyte BXBT-1900 | Asus UX305FA | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Mini PC | Mini PC | Laptop |
| Processor | Intel Core i3-5005U 2.00GHz 2 cores 4 threads | Intel Celeron J1900 2.00GHz (Turbo 2.416 GHz) 4 cores 4 threads | Intel Core M-5Y10c 0.8GHz (Turbo 2.00GHz) 2 cores 4 threads |
| Chipset | Intel Broadwell | Intel Atom Z36xxx/Z37xxx | Intel Broadwell-U-OPI |
| Memory | 8GB DDR4 (1600 MHz) | 4GB DDR3 (1600 MHz) | 8GB DDR3 (1866 MHz) |
| Graphics | Intel HD Graphics 5500 | Intel HD 2GB | Intel HD Graphics 5300 |
| Disk | 128GB Kingston NVMe | 250GB Samsung SSD 860 | 128GB SanDisk SSD |
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / System
Page 2 – Processor
Page 3 – Memory / Graphics
Page 4 – Disk / Specifications
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Lenovo ThinkPad T470 Ultrabook | |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | We spotlight the condition of our refurbished T470 laptop |
| Part 2 | Specifications of the T470 laptop using the inxi utility to interrogate the system |
| Part 3 | Installing the Manjaro distribution |
| Part 4 | We run a series of benchmarks on the T470 and compare to other machines |
| Part 5 | Multimedia performance including power management |