Apple releases firmware fix to unthrottle SATA controller.

[ZaZ]

I noticed Apple released a firmware update to unthrottle the SATA controller, which like the ThinkPads of the T60/T61 era were limited to SATA 1.5 speeds. My next thought is why won't Lenovo do this? It's a small 3.4MB update, at least for Apple and it would bring such joy to ThinkPad users like myself and others who'd love to put a drive like the X25-M or a Vertex drive in their ThinkPad. It seems like it would require so little effort on Lenovo's part, maybe I'm wrong. Plus it'd be a way for Lenovo earn some good will, where they've seemed to be lacking of late.

[qviri]

The new Macbooks physically had a 3.0 chip inside. Did the Thinkpads?

[ajkula66]

T60/p, R60, X60 and Z61 didn't, AFAIK. Not sure about the T61/p generation.

[ZaZ]

I think you're right about the T60, R60, etc., but I thought the T61 did.

[agarza]

It's to my understanding the T61 is also crippled to 1.5GB/s speeds, a real shame btw.

[Mark@Lenovo]

All,

It would indeed be great if Lenovo could have resolved this with a simple BIOS change. This question has come up on the Lenovo forum, and I provided the most detailed answer I could based on engineering's response. I suspect the ultrabay added a complication that apple may not have to contend with (?)

http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/mess ... 928#U97928
Here was the explanation:

"For Santa Rosa-based systems, the Intel ICH8 supports a SATA bus speed of up to 3.0 Gb/s. Lenovo made a design decision to prioritize maintaining compatibility with Ultrabay disk drives, which are connected via a SATA-to-PATA conversion chip which could not handle a 3.0 Gb/s SATA bus speed reliably. Therefore the system was standardized to 1.5 Gb/s.


In testing rotating media drives, our measurements show data throughput difference between 1.5 Gb/s and 3.0 Gb/s bus speed is less than 5% since the drive mechanics are the limiting throughput factor, rather than the SATA bus itself.


For those customers who choose to purchase an after-market SSD drive capable of SATA bus speeds up to 3.0 Gb/s, the system will interface with them at 1.5 Gb/s. Lenovo's official position is that the Santa Rosa systems are working as designed.


The Montevina based systems which began shipping last year have direct SATA interfaces for both drive bays and are enabled at a system level for SATA bus speeds of 3.0 Gb/s performance. Current Lenovo drives have firmware set to 1.5 Gb/s data rates.


Exchanging these drives for after-market drives which support SATA bus of 3.0 Gb/s should provide for the higher data rate at the overall system level. Again, it should be noted that our performance measurements show less than 5% performance improvement between 1.5 Gb/s and 3.0 Gb/s SATA bus speeds for rotating drives, since the drive mechanics are the limiting throughput factor, rather than the SATA bus itself.


After-market SSDs which support SATA bus speed of 3.0 Gb/s will operate at that bus speed. Depending on the data transfer test method used, your actual data throughput from a 3.0 Gb/s SATA bus speed should be 220-250 MB/s and about 90-120MB/s throughput when running on SATA bus of 1.5 Gb/s. This is due to the bus signaling used for the SATA bus, as well as overhead for error checking."

Best regards,

Mark

[qviri]

Thanks for the official answer, Mark.

Just to clarify/confirm in case someone isn't fully familiar with codenames, Santa Rosa-based machines are the T61, R61, and X61 (but not Z61*), and Montevina-based machines are the T400/T500 and family.