ThinkPads and SATA Drives

[BillG]

I'm looking at the ThinkPad family from a very broad perspective. Before being purchased by Lenovo, can anyone tell me if IBM made any ThinkPads that used the fast SATA hard drives (instead of ATA)?

[basketb]

Not sure whether this is what you meant, but the T43 and R52 machines can use a SATA hard drive in the ultrabay HD adapter. The Z series was the first to use SATA as main internal HD and they were introduced shortly after Lenovo took over.

[AGoodSolution]

I'm going to speculate you may be using the term ATA and PATA interchangeably.

The ThinkPad family of laptops has been in existence longer than some of the forum members have been alive.

The T4x series is considered the last of the PATA series but T4x ultrabays can support the SATA adapter after you snap off a plastic grommet meant to prevent insertion.

The SATA adapter executes the SATA drive with full access and latency times using RPM and other benchmarking tools we clocked the same performance stats regardless of whether or not the ThinkPad officially supported SATA.

One frustrating aspect of the ThinkPad SATA drives is locating the proper DOS mode driver so a clean installation of 2003 server when prompted to press F6 and add extra SCSI drivers before you can incorporate the driver and continue the installation past the first reboot and when entering GUI mode setup.

The issue is avoided if you have a slipstreamed version of 2003Server and SP1 or SP2 or a novel little method is to create a boot floppy and after the DOS portion of winnt.exe has completed, you mount the SATA drive with a different system or comparable utility to copy the boot.in file from the root of the SATA drive onto your floppy and just use the floppy to complete the reboots into GUI portion setup.

When you're ready, just drop the setup CD into the tray and perform a reboot then from the Recovery console I belive is is the /fixboot and /fixmbr commands to lay down a bootable sector zero and you can just tell that always hard to find F6 SCSI driver to screw off.

[AGoodSolution]

..and after all that typing, I forgot to answer the quesiton about when Lenovo took over and this isn't a clean answer since integrations and mergers aren't performed overnight.

The T4x series is considered by many and myself as the last of the IBM's, a great majority of the T40's and T41's were made in Japan or Singapore, less of them in Singapore since Singapore labor is more expensieve.

At this time IBM was already using Lenovo of China to make ThinkCentre desktops and more of the components of the T4x's even though other contractors were just assembling more Lenovo Chinese parts into their own assembly process.

This also raised controversy since it was suspected the Chinese could easily insert spy devices into IBM computers which is a large supplier to US Govt Agencies and the unanswered quesiton of whether not the Chinese could infiltrate us through "phantom" chips was a real threat.

IT is certainly possible an embedded motherboard chip could be inserted that could be used to create a real time connection a designtated destination and just monitor for key words, or recieve remote instructions then transmit this data using encrypted methods so even the vicitm would have difficulty detecting it.

IT wouldn't be impossible to detect but theoretically if it occurred and it was discovered Lenovo of China had sold thousands of thousands infiltrated systems to govt agenciess....... it would be grounds for war on our part.

In my opinion the T43 with the larger 15inch screen was the first of the Lenovo's and last of the IBM's since this seemed to be the last model made in farily equal numbers by Lenovo plus older suppliers in Japan.

some in the ThinkPad community feel the newer Lenovos are lesser quality but I disagree and offer that Lenovo's have merits the earlier IBM ThinkPads didn't, such as the newer Lenovos have sturdier keyboards than my earlier IBM models and I had a preferred membership at http://www.machinaelectronics.com.com since I bought more $6 replacement keys and key springs there any other customer they had I'll bet you.
There the only place I've found that sells individual keys and undersprings and they've never been out of stock now matter what I needed to buy.
$6 per key is alot cheaper than a whole new keyboard.

But the new and incompatible Lenovo Power Supply was baffling since IBM used the same power supply connector for more than 10 years and they're interchangeable, this is important if you travel for a living and you're at a client site and your power supply dies.

Chances are they use ThinkPads and their IT group can loan you a power supply until you find a store in town that sells ThinkPad powersupplies and other parts.

Try finding a Dell power supply in a retail store.... not likely.

Regardless of whether or not you think Lenovo beats IBM Japan, they all still have that annoying driver model where you have to download 1/2 GB of drivers files and the useless executables and config apps when all you really wanted for four *.sys files and a couple of *.infs !!!!!

[Marin85]

@AGoodSolution: Check this one Last IBM ThinkPad

[eecon]

@AGoodSolution: Check this one Last IBM ThinkPad

Gee Whiz .... I wonder if my 15" Flexview T42 will become a collectible like some of my other stuff in the garage?

[Marin85]

@eecon: Is that all of you? That´s pretty nice "little" collection you have there

EDIT: Where did the pic disappear? I thought you may want to tell us some more about your collection, let´s say in the off-topic It would be definitely very interesting!

[Temetka]

Holy God!