Lenovo ThinkPad T431s review: A high-priced Ultrabook without the high-end specs

LENOVO, INC. ThinkPad T431s $1,209.00 Lenovo's pricey new entry into the Ultrabook market caters deftly to business users, but it fails to deliver most of what's good about Ultrabooks: speed, portability, and convenience.


Lenovo’s long-standing tradition of producing black, boxy, boring laptops continues with the ThinkPad T431s, and it’s a testament to their underlying quality that businesses and business users continue to embrace them. But the company might want to rethink the “Ultrabook” suffix tacked onto this one's name, which conjures images of sleek, sexy, and speedy machines. The T431s is none of those things.

Rather, it has the heft and bulk of a more traditional laptop, weighing 3.6 pounds and measuring 0.8 inch thick. One suspects Lenovo could have squeezed in an optical drive, though at least the system leverages its large chassis to pack in plenty of expansion options: ethernet and VGA ports, a Mini DisplayPort, a 4-in-1 memory card reader, and a Smart Card reader for organizations that still rely on them. It also has a fingerprint reader, another nice security-minded perk. The system has only two USB 3.0 ports (three would be better), but one of them is powered so you can charge a mobile device even when the ThinkPad is off.

The T431s ranks among the slower Core i5–equipped Ultrabooks we’ve tested.

  Like a growing number of laptops, the T431s lacks a drive-activity indicator. And although Lenovo included an LED for the Fn-key lock, the Caps Lock key didn’t get the same simple amenity. That’s inexcusable from a company known for great keyboards.

Indeed, this ThinkPad’s comfortable, backlit, perfectly spaced keys make typing a pleasure. It also has dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, though they’re not grouped together. That’s a mild annoyance; a bigger one is the bottom-left corner placement of the Fn key. Most touch-typists’ fingers are accustomed to finding a Ctrl key there.

ROBERT CARDINLenovo's ThinkPad T431s is a relatively thick, heavy, and slow Ultrabook.

 Lenovo has redesigned its touchpad. This one is appreciably spacious and smooth to the touch, with buttons in all four corners. The top two are intended for use with Lenovo’s trademark pointing stick, which seems downright quaint today, but its presence will undoubtedly please longtime ThinkPad users. The entire touchpad is also a button, and that “give” can be awkward at times, especially if you land a little harder than you anticipated with your finger. To avoid accidental cursor clicks, you’ll need to develop a light touch.

ROBERT CARDINThinkPads are known for their sturdy construction, and the T431s is no exception. With its Worldbench score of 121, the ThinkPad ranks among the slower Core i5-equipped Ultrabooks we’ve tested. The Sony VAIO Fit 15 posted a higher score, and the 128GB SSD in the Dell Latitude 6430u helped it earn a significantly higher result. The ThinkPad has a quick 7200-rpm, 500GB hard drive augmented by a 24GB SSD cache.

The ThinkPad T431s was only slightly faster than the Asus VivoBook S550CA we use as a notebook reference point. (Click to enlarge.)

  Despite having only a three-cell battery, our review unit managed to last 4 hours, 45 minutes in our rundown test, which is about average for systems in this class. Like other Ultrabooks, the T431s has a nonremovable battery—a potential problem for business travelers who must swap in a spare power pack when the first one runs dry.

The ThinkPad’s 14-inch screen has native resolution of 1600 by 900 pixels. That’s sufficient for enjoying HD movies and other video, but it’s shy of the 1920-by-1080 displays offered by other Ultrabooks (such as the Samsung Series 9). What’s more, we expected a laptop in this price class to include a touchscreen, but the T431s lacks one. On the plus side, the screen exhibits very little glare, and Intel’s integrated HD Graphics 4000 supplies enough horsepower for stutter-free full-screen video (at least based on what we streamed from Hulu and YouTube).

As Ultrabooks go, the ThinkPad T431s is far from the skinniest, lightest, fastest, or longest-lasting model you can buy. And without perks like a touchscreen and solid-state storage (the latter is available on other configurations), it’s hard to justify Lenovo’s higher-than-average price. Business users might continue to appreciate the ThinkPad’s sturdy design, security features, and comfy keyboard, but others will find more features and better performance for less money. 

Hitachi brings high-end flash to midrange HUS VM storage line

Enterprises are gaining the ability to turn existing storage platforms over to flash even as solid-state media remains mostly a tool for caching and for applications with special requirements.

On Wednesday, Hitachi Data Systems is bringing flash technology from its high-end storage platform to its midrange Hitachi Unified Storage Virtualization Machine (HUS VM) system and introducing software for the system that will allow it to be used as a high-performance, all-flash array. Other vendors are also entering the all-flash arena, including Hewlett-Packard, which announced the 3Par StoreServ 7450 Storage system less than a month ago.

Hitachi is taking the Hitachi Accelerated Flash Modulefrom its Virtual Storage Platform and offering it for the HUS VM, a midrange array designed for smaller enterprises with less need for scale. The new, flash-optimized software included in Wednesday’s announcement will roughly double the potential throughput of the system, and another software release later this year will double it again to 1 million IOPS (I/O operations per second), the company said.

The HUS VM, introduced last year, fits in between the VSP platform for large enterprises and the HUS 100 family, Hitachi’s entry-level line. Customers can now outfit an HUS VM entirely with SSDs (solid-state drives) or mix those components with spinning hard drives.

The flash module packs 1.6TB of capacity onto a card that goes deeper into a standard 19-inch rack unit than a typical SSD would, making more efficient use of space, according to Roberto Basilio, vice president of infrastructure platforms product management at Hitachi. The module also uses multilevel cell flash, which has higher density than the single-level cell type used in many enterprise SSDs.

But speed is at the heart of solid-state adoption and of Hitachi’s enhancements to the HUS VM. Each Hitachi Accelerated Flash module has its own multicore, multithreaded controller chip that can carry out functions such as compression and wear-leveling without affecting read and write performance, Basilio said.

To go along with the new flash module performance that this design brings, Hitachi has introduced software improvements to the HUS VM that can double its overall throughput. The HUS jumps from 250,000 IOPS (I/O operations per second) to 500,000 IOPS. Another optional software upgrade, coming in the fourth quarter, will double that yet again, to 1 million IOPS, according to Hitachi.

The rapid read and write performance of flash can help speed up enterprise applications where needed, though it will coexist with hard disk drives for the forseeable future, said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Terri McClure.

“Judicious use of some level of solid-state storage at every layer of the stack is going to become the norm, over time,” McClure said.

The key is good data-management software to control how the two types of media work together, she said. This software has improved since the introduction of flash storage, and Hitachi’s capabilities there are strong, she said.

Enterprises will be able to fit 12 flash modules on each tray in the HUS VM, with a full eight-tray system holding more than 150TB of capacity. That will double by the end of this year, as the company plans to come out with a 3.2TB module.

The flash modules are available now for $28,427 each, and an all-flash HUS VM with 8TB of flash capacity costs about $300,000, including the Base Operating System and three years of maintenance.