I recently bought a new Samsung Series 7 Notebook (700Z5A S03) as my replacement for my old Dell Latitude. It ships with a 750 GB hard disk with "8 GB ExpressCache". I replaced the HD by a faster SSD. In order to replace the disk, one has to open the bottom part of the case. The inside looks like this:
My model came with a Hitachi 7K750-750 inside. That's a usual harddisk. The so called "8 GB ExpressCache" seems to be on the board itself and is still visible as a usual blockdevice on linux after replacing the orignal hard disk. It's identified by hdparm as "Model=SanDisk iSSD P4 8GB, FwRev=SSD 9.14". For an SSD it seems to be quite slow. I use it as a swap device.
# hdparm -t /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
Timing buffered disk reads: 362 MB in 3.02 seconds = 119.98 MB/sec
Ubuntu Oneiric runs out of the box on the Notebook - at least to some extend. The Hybrid Graphics cannot be used up to now due to lack of driver support. Some folks at
http://linux-hybrid-graphics.blogspot.com/ are working on that. I also couldn't get the dedicated graphics card disabled by following
various instructions on that topic. As soon as the radeon kernel module is loaded (which is required for vgaswitcheroo to be even available) the power consumption of the system is quite high. The lowest power consumption I could achieve so far was by blacklisting the radeon module via modprobe. Idle power consumption, reported by powertop, is about 20-21W. This seems to be quite high as on Windows a idle power consumption of about 15W
was reported. This might come from the dedicated graphic, not being fully disabled by just unloading radeon.
Also the touchpad identified as "PS/2 Elantech Touchpad" by xinput list is not working as a touchpad but just a normal mouse. This is quite annoying as there is no way to disable tab-click. I stuck with disabling/enabling the touchpad completely so far (xinput set-prop 14 132 0/1 on my device).
The notebook unfortunately cannot be ordered without an operating system. It ships with a Windows 7 Pro DVD labelled "System Recovery Media". Despite the labelling, the DVD acts as a usual Windows installation DVD that can also be installed and activated on other systems (tested on a virtualbox). This at least makes it possible to sell it on Ebay - together with the license sticker from the bottom of the case that can easily be removed by steaming it a bit.
UPDATE:
The Touchpad is supported in Kernel 3.2. Even three fingers are supported (can be used to move windows in unity). By default it's quite insensitive though, I had to use my thumb to get the cursor moving. Adding the following lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf fixes this:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "touchpad catchall"
Driver "synaptics"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Option "FingerLow" "6"
Option "FingerHigh" "10"
#
# Option "VertScrollDelta" "10"
EndSection