I had a Lenovo Y50-70 laptop (16GB RAM, i7 Intel Core 4702HQ CPU) sit around. It had hardly been used because this laptop was always extremely slow. I am not particularly sensitive or critical, but the machine really sucked – the Internet is full of posts, complaints and discussions regarding this issue [link]. There seemed to be no solution, even installing an SSD [link] apparently had not resolved the issue.
So I was not sure what to do.
After performing a range of tests and reading up, I decided that the problem was most likely that the computer had a really weird hard drive. This seemed to be a clear possibility after changing the memory swap frequency (sysctl vm.swappiness=10), it got notably faster.
So I opened the device and took a look.
As it turned out, it was equipped with a Western Digital WD Black WD10S21X native hybrid SSHD (solid state hybrid drive). After identifying this as the notoriously slow and ill engineered piece of resistance, I went for the fastest SSD that I could get, a Samsung V-NAND SSD 850 Evo, and put a current Ubuntu 16.04 Linux on it.
The machine now is absolutely blazing at top speed. It is as fast as one could ever wish. There will also be a new battery.
