T43p Second Harddrive Options

[baz]

According to IBM the max specs for a second drive are 5400rpm and 100gB, whereas the T series supports the faster 7200rpm drives. Are there any comments as to whether a 7200rpm drive can be installed in the ultrabay, or whether the best is a 5400rpm.

[christopher_wolf]

I haven't seen anything directly from IBM stating that, but I am currently running a 60GB 7200RPM Hitachi in my Ultrabay along with my Primary HDD. The 7200RPM HDD performs as a 7200RM 60GB HDD should and that was confirmed when I benchmarked it with HDTune.

It is the first device (Device 0) under the Second IDE channel and should, if it has a primary partition formatted to NTFS, come up on Windows XP under UDMA 5...I have seen it come up as UDMA 3, but that was when it had a very bizzare partition layout and many FSes from a bunch of different OSes I was trying out.

[hiyel]

Hi,
I'm planning to get an ultrabay slim hdd adapter as well.
How does the power managment of this second drive work? In my case this drive will not be accessed 90% of the time, and I don't want it to be spinning all the time, making noise and drawing power. Does a new item appears on the power managment window or something? Or it will just share the same policies with the primary drive?
Thanks.

[christopher_wolf]

By default, it shares the same power management policies as the primary HDD although they can be different. If you set the idle spool-down timers in Windows or the Power Manager, they will effect both HDDs in the same way. The HDAPS will also ramp the heads on both drives should it detect an imminent shock, as usual.

[hiyel]

Thanks for your reply,
So you said they can be different. How do you change it then?

[GomJabbar]

I don't know about changing the power properties differently. At least I haven't run across it to my knowledge. I know you can stop the second hard drive using Fn + F9, or the Safely Remove Hardware icon in the notification area. If you stop the drive this way it should consume no power. The only problem is, you have to eject and reinsert the drive to access it again.

[hiyel]

I see, ok, thanks.
Well I guess now the question is... Let's say HD idle timer is set to 5 minutes. Does this timer check the drives individually? If that's the case, then it would be fine. Primary will be accessed frequently and it will not stop spinning. But secondary will be accessed rarely and it will stop spinning after 5 minutes. That would be great. But if the secondary keeps spinning because primary is accessed all the time, that would be dumb. Does anybody know this?
thanks...