Question regarding Hard Drives

[tomartom]

I have just purchased three Ibm T series Laptops, one is a fully functional T41 and the other two are T40's of which one can be made fully functional.

In Aus, it seems that ide drives for laptops are not as economical as sata drives, and the second hand ide drives are overpriced. Here is what i would like to know;

1. Can I physically use an ide to sata adapter and still fit a the drive in the hard drive slot? (i have heard that using an adapter the sata drive does not fit in the existing slot).
2. Is there a hard drive limitation to which the T 40/41 series will recognise, say up to 250Gig.


Also any additional advice would be appreciated.

Cheers Tony

[Tasurinchi]

I'm not sure about question #1, but for question #2 the answer would be "no", there are no limitations for the size of a HD.

I have a WD320GB drive in my T43p and it's working without any issues. It's the biggest PATA drive available. The same model worked also on an X31 I used to have.

Coming back to question #1, there is a IDE-SATA adapter that can be used instead of the optical drive, it looks like this. You will find some threads about it in this forum. Looks like it works with no issues either.

My 0.02 cents...

[lukee]

1. Can I physically use an ide to sata adapter and still fit a the drive in the hard drive slot? (i have heard that using an adapter the sata drive does not fit in the existing slot).

Probably yes, with something like this:
http://www.pc-esc.com/2008122441948173.jpg

But:

1. you need to find such adapter, which will be not so big as on picture (due to primary HDD bay size) and will have built-in power (without desktop's power connector)
2. your ThinkPad need to be probably 15" model, because in 15" shell there is about 2 - 3cm of space which can be used for this adapter.
3. Those adapters limits overall transfer rate. I've Hitachi 7k500 drive in UltraBay slot (PATA to SATA chip) and I can measure only about 75 MB/s at maximum even this drive has performance around 110 MB/s.


Good luck!

[tomartom]

Thanks everyone,
I just purchased an ultrabay with ide to sata.

Thanks everyone for your help, and so very quick at replying

All the best from Aus

Regards Tony