People with eagle eyes at Chrome Unboxed saw a new American variant of the Lenovo Flex 5 Chromebook at Costco today. This model is almost identical to the $ 409 model that has been available for a few weeks (see my first impressions of the Lenovo Flex 5 Chromebook here) but is priced at $ 479.99 at Costco. You only get a hardware difference for that $ 80 premium – and I think it’s worth it.
What is the difference?
Instead of 64GB of eMMC 5.1 storage, according to official specifications, the higher-priced model has up to 128GB of local M.2 NVMe storage.
Normally I say only get the updated model if you just need more space.
However, just two days ago I did an interesting experiment on a gaming PC that I built last month.
I added an M.2 NVMe drive to the gaming rig that originally had an SSD with SATA interface.
And I did some disk benchmarking.
I mention this because eMMC 5.1 storage, according to the Enterprise Storage Forum, reads and writes data at approximately the same speed as the SSD you were using:
The 5.1 eMMC storage standard offers transfer rates of up to 400 MB / s. That’s roughly equivalent to the highest SATA SSD transfer speeds, and clearly fast enough for business applications.
They are correct?
Well here are the benchmarks I ran on the old SATA based SSD I was using for the Windows 10 PC. They look in line with the eMMC 5.1 speeds:
After installing the M.2 NVMe drive, I tested the speeds.
Here are the results:
The speed difference is obvious, about 60 to 80 percent at disk read and write speeds. I knew that M.2 NVMe storage via a PCI 3 interface was fast, but I didn’t realize that it could literally read 3.1 GB of data from a drive in a second.
But wait: Most of the data that “Chromebooks” “move” is likely going to and from the cloud. So does disk transfer speeds really matter?
I used to be in the field “probably not”, but the continuation of my experiment moved me to the group “maybe”.
It turns out that the reference speeds were so fast that I ended up changing the OS installation from the slower SSD and moving it over the faster disk. And now everything in Windows happens faster.
The start to login is about 6 seconds, for example when it used to be more like 15 to 20. Accessing and opening applications is faster. Jumping deep into Windows settings is faster.
Everything. It is faster.
Okay, this is not a Windows 10 blog – it is about Chromebooks.
The point is, I’m willing to bet anyone the $ 68 I spent on my NVMe M.2 unit last week that the $ 479.99 Lenovo Flex 5 Chromebook is recognizably faster than its $ 409 counterpart with eMMC storage. That speed is worth it, as are the extra 64GB of storage for me.
So if you’re thinking of getting the $ 409 model and think it might be worth it too, you can check out the updated version at Costco. I know I would.
