T43p SATA Guide (There are pictures, it's 2020)

[Bibin]

It has been almost a decade since the OP. I no longer have any Pentium M ThinkPads, even though I like the physical design of the unit. I'm genuinely curious by what everyone means when they say they "use" these machines. Is it for compatibility with fringe / old hardware that needs that LPT port (yet can't just use literally any of the many solutions for this)? Work that depends very little on the specifics of the machine (holing up in the woods and writing a novel? Using an ancient copy of Cubase for music production?)

[TPFanatic]

I can think of getting every last value from what used to be a very expensive machine, bought new.

[Bibin]

When I posted about this modification, it was a machine available for less than $100. It would be a bit sad if someone is using something old primarily to spite their own purchase.

[lophiomys]

Thanks to ajkula66 and RealBlackStuff
I use a T43p SATAmod UXGA every day for code development and as a typewriter.
That is for the keyboards (the matching external one too)
and the 4:3 screen at 133DPI and a case with the great haptics. This is unsurpassed!

The old CPU of the T43p is telling you directly, if some program or application is bloated code.
Real number crunching is done on secondary machines.

The closest thing I got, is a rubberized Dell Inspiron 15 Gaming (aka early Alienware) with a matte 282DPI 16:9 screen.
But 16:9 with thick screen bezels is an abomination. No Trackstick. And the keyboard haptics are not as good.

Cheers from the land with the Explosive Trees,
LoPHi

[dandreye]

I was thinking of using my retired T42 and SATA modded T43 in home audio: a brief test showed that with a USB/LAN connected music storage and something like VLC Media Player installed and controlled remotely over WiFi from a smartphone they do quite well in that role. The idea was to only use the smartphone for control, leaving it out of the music streaming path (I do have a Bluetooth DAC as well though, primarily for the guests' convenience). Depending on the audio listening pattern/duration this could also fall under their aforementioned usage if the latter is loosely defined.

[fissionpowered]

Has anyone done benchmarks on a true SATA conversion?

In my T43 I'm using a $12 IDE-> MSATA adapter (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B093DL2PWL/) (Note: had to trim part of the case for it to seat properly) and a $35 Transcend 128GB m.2 SSD. I just have the machine for XP use, so capacity isn't a concern.

Crystal Diskmark puts the drive at ~89 MB/s seq read and write and ~25MB rnd write, ~40 MB/s rnd read.

Curious what a true SATA conversion does?

[ajkula66]

Curious what a true SATA conversion does?

Just bear in mind that it's SATA I but I got well over 100 with an old Intel X-25E.

[fissionpowered]

Do you happen to have random speeds? I'm sure my system is maxing out the PATA/UDMA bus during sequential read/writes, but those speeds aren't as relevant for day to day use. The bigger question (for me) is whether PATA presents a real bottleneck in random writes (especially with vintage CPU speeds and whatnot).

Would be hard to get a perfect apples-apples comparison given the wide variety of SSD drives available.

[scram]

Hi everyone !
Big thanks for everyone have collaborate at this thread !!
I read everything here about this mod in order to reborn my old T43 !
But I wonder something about wiring according SATA standard.

Marvell chip diagram says :
Pin 27 : RX +
Pin 28 : RX -
Pin 31 : TX -
Pin 32 : TX+

SATA standard says :
A+ : TX +
A- : TX -
B- : RX -
B+ : RX+

So by association, it give :
Pin 27 : B+
Pin 28 : B-
Pin 31 : A-
Pin 32 : A+

But it is opposite to what appears on this thread beginning :
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 07#p617507
Could everyone tell me if I wrong or not !?
Thanks

[RealBlackStuff]

This is the correct one: (as shown here: viewtopic.php?p=617507#p617507)

27 RX_P = Receiver POS (your A+)
28 RX_M = Receiver NEG (your A-)

32 TX_P = Transmitter POS (your B+)
31 TX_M = Transmitter NEG (your B-)

Better believe me, I have only done this about 150 times...

[scram]

@RBS Ok thanks. I understand, you have many issues to valid it !

[WEissbr0t]

Interesting! I learned a lot with all of this informations , and this will explain, why my M2 -> PATA Adapter will not work properly (slowdowns and freezes) with Windows 8+ on this machine. Windows 7 works fine. I guess the newer OSes detecting the SATA- Controller lurking behind...