T42 SSD Conversion Success (1.8" SATA drive + bridge board)

[Tycho]

After some disappointment with a KingSpec 64 GB PATA SSD in Windows XP (worked OK after lots of tweaking, worked fine in Linux ... no pauses, but just wasn't what I was hoping for) I started hunting around for other solutions. I eventually landed on this forum here: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=85862

Using the same micro SATA to PATA adaptor listed in that thread and an Intel 1.8" 80 GB SSD along with some hot glue to hold it in place. I just dabbed some in to keep the "far" end of the drive from flopping around where the drive cover goes. The drive is very secure. Total cost was $87. $15 for the bridge board and $72 for the SSD on eBay. Less than $1 per GB for SSD performance. And I keep my ultra bay drive too.

Adaptor/bridge board is here
http://www.ebay.com/itm/220775113085?ss ... 1783wt_965

Very very happy with the upgrade. Palm rest no longer creaks on the right side, machine is a bit lighter, significantly quieter, and heat is slightly reduced (the SSD still gets warm, but not as warm as the Momentus 7200.1 it replaced).

Machine is a T42, 14.1" SXGA+, 2.0 GHz Dothan, 2.0 GB Ram, XP Pro SP3. Very solid benchmark numbers. Looks like saturation of the PATA bus on reads and maybe a limitation of the SSD on writes. The most recent poster in the original thread just reported 75+ MB/s sequential writes with a Kingston SSD. But of course where it really pays off is the 4K stuff. Smokin' fast!


Remember, small file read/write performance and low latency are what really make SSDs shine, not just fast sequential transfers. These small file operations aren't even close to being limited by the ATA100 bus or the bridge board yet, so don't listen to the naysayers who insist that ATA100 limits the benefits of a SSD. When 4K numbers get to 60-70 MB/s that argument will become valid.

[poshgeordie]

Excellent work - I'll be trying this myself. It also gives a whole new life to these older machines where the IDE drives become more difficult to find.

Could you confirm the SSD you're using is something like this? if not could you give a link to the one you find does work for you.

The more I think about this, it's worth seeing if the SSD can be mounted on a modified IDE Drive carrier so it can be removed as with the original.

[Tycho]

This is the exact model of SSD I am using (different auction tho): http://www.ebay.com/itm/220868585851?ss ... 2074wt_211
I have the part number in the bottom of my Crystal Disk Mark benchmark in the first post.

The caddy available on Shapeways at the bottom of the following page will fit the bridge board I listed earlier and hard drive listed above perfectly: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 2&start=60

I would suspect that this caddy would fit the drive/bridge board just fine too: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1-8-Micro-SATA- ... _500wt_994
You'd need to remove the microSATA to SATA board and put the PATA to microSATA bridge board in its place.

I didn't buy a caddy because I wasn't sure what type of 1.8" drive I was going to use (some are just bare circuit boards, some are half length, etc). So I was just buying the parts to see if it worked. It worked a treat and since I'm so pleased, I will likely never be removing it, so hot glue became the solution for now (and probably forever).

I'd bet someone could buy a bunch of SSDs, a bunch of bridge boards, and a bunch of caddies, and sell T4x "kits" for a few more bucks than the pieces themselves cost. People would pay extra for a drop in solution. This solution offers significantly improved performance over PATA SSDs that are out there due to the far superior 4k write performance. And it's cheaper.

[jaobedoza]

is this going to work on a t43/p?

[RealBlackStuff]

Yes it would.
But if you remove the SATA-PATA bridge chip from the T43/p motherboard, you can directly connect a SATA drive instead of the old PATA one, after you replace the PATA connector with a SATA connector and hook that up.
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=94308

[ChugokuOtaku]

is this going to work on a t43/p?

Unfortunately no, please see this post
It only works with T40/p T41/p & T42/p

IDE SSDs aside, your only choice with a T43 is to use an SATA SSD in the ultrabay caddy, until as RBS mentioned, you perform the SATA mod.

[fefrie]

wow, if I read off of all these posts, a fifteen dollar piece will allow me to upgrade to ssd without having to 'hack'. It's simply plug and go?

[Tycho]

For any pre-T43 system (any system with a native PATA controller) this is correct.

I am retrofitting an old iBook G4 1067 MHz machine with 1.25 GB of ram with the same drive setup next week (soon as my parts get here from eBay). I think this modification will breathe new life into a lot of older machines, even if they are a bit short on processor and memory.

[ajkula66]

fefrie wrote:

wow, if I read off of all these posts, a fifteen dollar piece will allow me to upgrade to ssd without having to 'hack'. It's simply plug and go?

No.

If you read about the whole setup carefully, it's actually two pieces and about $50...

[Tycho]

Excluding the drive, I just bought a bridge board. It was $15 shipped. I then used hot glue in lieu of a hard drive cage and it works great.

$15 + SSD cost (whatever 1.8 drive you choose). Hot glue is like 10 cents/stick. The shapeways tray is nice, but this SSD is the end of the road for my T42. It will never be upgraded again as long as I own it, so the more permanent hot glue solution is cheaper and just dandy considering the drive will never be replaced. With the OE drive cover back in place, you can't tell the difference.

Different strokes for different folks tho.

[Tycho]

Update... I had to mess with this more. I had a LiteOn LE-128M1S, Samsung PM800, and Samsung PB22-J SSD sitting around ... and a 44 pin to regular SATA bridge board (still JMicron 20330 based, but will work with "standard" SATA laptop drives).

Also, I was having a recurring problem of the Intel 1st gen 80 GB drive reverting to PIO mode (requiring a quick regedit delete of the master ide channel checksum entry) and I wanted to see if the Samsung drives exhibited the same issue.

So...

1. The LiteOn drive did not work through the bridge. It did not work in my Mac Mini on native SATA either, but did work in a SATA FireWire enclosure I have. So I set that aside.

2. The Samsung drives both worked great. They support TRIM too, but I'm not running Vista, so the fact that both had garbage collection firmware was important. I had to wait a couple hours for GC to speed the drives up. Initial performance was miserable. It came right up after a couple hours letting the laptop sit idle tho. Worth noting that the Samsung drives can't hold a candle to the Intel one on 4k writes. Not even close. Still very fast compared to any magnetic disk. No issues with PIO mode or having to delete MasterIdDataCheckSum so far...

3. The standard SATA bridge board was significantly wider physically than the uSATA one, which made it tricker to install (can't remove the plastic cage, install the drive, then reinstall ... you have to "thread" the drive in through the standard "hole" with the laptop fully assembled. Hot glue the drive and bridge board together at the SATA connector so if you tug on the far end of the drive you get the bridge board also. The SATA connector has less friction than the PATA one, so if you don't do this and remove the drive, the bridge board will stay deep within your ThinkPad (and it's tough to get out, even with long nose pliers).

4. You can do this for under $73 bucks. The "full size sata" bridge board is $7.29 and Samsung 64 GB drives are $65 on ebay right now. This is a very very low price for some serious performance.

5. The disk activity LED works with the Samsung drive/bridge combo! It didn't work with my Intel drive/bridge combo. Nice to see the little guy blinking again, especially as the SSD itself is silent.

Pretty stout performance per dollar (note lower 4k numbers relative to Intel)


System Specs:
T42 2378 1.7 Dothan @ 2.26 on 133 bus
2.0 GB RAM @ 177 MHz DDR
Samsung PB22-JS3 128 GB SSD
JMicron 20330 44 pin to SATA bridge board (http://www.ebay.com/itm/220752756189?ss ... 1903wt_954)

Gallery: http://web.me.com/dgiessel/Pictures/mis ... index.html

The pieces


Hot glue the SATA connectors together (or you'll have a hell of a time digging the bridge board out of the 44 pin motherboard plug)


Tack the far end of the drive in place


Put a dab of hot glue from the top to the bottom of the case to reduce flex and ensure the drive is secure


Put the cover on and hit the road

[TioFrancotirador]

Hi,

First of all thanks guys for your posts. They were inspiration for me to put SSD into my T42.
I did it the way described in first post. However instead of Intel I used:
Kingston SSDNow V+180 64GB Micro SATA II 3GB/S 1.8 Inch Solid State Drive SVP180S2/64G .

Here are the results from CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1:
Test No: 5 with 1000MB
Name/Read/Write
Seq: 84.49 / 64.24
512k: 80.49 / 32.45
4k: 14.73 / 6.664
4kQD32: 12.85 / 6.898

Cheers,

[lordvalumart]

Hi there,

Thanks to all you guys for the encouragement and advice. I took the plunge and fitted an 80Gb Intel X18M (G2) into my T42p, using the microsata adapter board here http://www.amazon.co.uk/MicroSATA-Femal ... 358&sr=8-1.

The result is a revelation. The T42p was quite a high-specced machine 8 years ago, but mine had become totally IO bound. Now it boots like lightning, launches apps quickly, and no more random delays while it sits there thrashing the disk.

A couple of hints which may be useful for anyone following the same path:

• The Intel SSD Toolbox works fine with the microsata adapter, allowing me to TRIM the drive even though I'm still using Windows XP. I couldn't get the toolbox's "secure erase" function to work, but that's not a big problem.
• If you plan to clone an existing Windows installation onto the new disk, you'll run into the "Thinkpad drive cloning" problem described elsewhere. In summary, the Thinkpad's BIOS reports a drive as having different geometry (heads, cylinders, etc.) from any other BIOS or external drive enclosure. Thus a drive which is partitioned by another machine (or external enclosure) cannot be used successfully to boot the Thinkpad. The solution is to make sure you partition the drive in the Thinkpad, after which you can clone files onto the drive in any way you want. I used the Gparted live CD to partition the SSD and write the MBR while the drive was installed in the Thinkpad, then installed both the SSD and the old drive in my desktop and copied the files and folders from the old hard drive onto the SSD, using XCOPY to preserve attributes, security ACLs, etc.
• If you're cloning an existing Windows installation, it pays to disable the pagefile and the hibernation file before cloning, then re-create them afterwards. I failed to do this, and had some problems with the pagefile causing BSODs until I deleted it and re-created it again.

Now I just need to finish it all off with one of those custom-built caddies from Shapeways.

[FAydin]

Thanks to everybody’s help here I managed to upgrade my T42 to SSD drive also. Although I love my T42 and use it daily, I still wanted to make this conversion as cost effective as possible so followed Tycho's foot steps.

I bought full size bridge for $5.50 from ebay.
64gig Samsung SSD for $55 from ebay.

I did not hot glue the pieces though. (I did not have any glue sticks at home…) I simply tied the SSD to bridge board! I did have to align the SSD with Paragon PAT and below are the report cards!

CrystalDisk Mark with original hard drive http://i40.tinypic.com/282ht9i.jpg
Samsung SSD before alignment http://i43.tinypic.com/2v7ts35.jpg
Samsung SSD after alignment http://i41.tinypic.com/21ne7gl.jpg

Thank you again everybody for sharing wealth of your knowledge.

[lordvalumart]

A couple of folk have PMed me over the last month or so to say that they have tried the same setup as me and are seeing frequent freezes or BSODs. (Just to recap, I have a T42p running XP SP3, with an Intel X18-M installed in the main drive bay using the PATA-to-microSATA adapter board).

I also suffered from frequent freezes / BSODs and did some research on the STOP codes which were being reported on the blue screen. They usually related to timeouts in paging-in memory, so I figured the machine was having problems obtaining pages from the system pagefile. Sure enough, turning off the pagefile greatly reduced the frequency of problems, but didn't eliminate them completely.

A little time with Google revealed that the JM20330 chip (which runs the adapter board) is known to cause occasional problems with DMA timeouts. This thread here suggests that moving to a slower DMA speed or a smaller block size seems to fix the problem: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ide/45166 But I don't think either the DMA mode or block size can be controlled from Windows.

So I'm still seeing occasional freezes / BSODs, especially when the machine is doing something disk-intensive. But it doesn't happen too often, and the performance the rest of the time is absolutely stellar; so I can live with it.

Nevertheless, I'd be interested to hear from anyone who can find a complete cure.

[Johan]

@ lordvalumart:

THANKS a whole lot for sharing this, well, certainly in my view, extremely interesting information - your contribution is super valuable and indeed highly, highly appreciated... it is actually because of people like you who share such expert-info that I keep hanging around on this forum (!).

I have taken the liberty of "spreading" your super-interesting information to two other, very related, threads; the German Der etwas andere SATA-Mod für T42 und Verwandte and the thread 1.8" SATA to 2.5" IDE converter?

Once again, THANKS a whole lot for sharing this... I am almost about to bend myself out of shape of pure happiness, hope and gratefulness. Oliver: Should you ever happen to visit Copenhagen, I surely owe you a big, BIG, BIG

Thanks - here's hope again...

Johan

[andi t43p]

@ lordvalumart:

THANKS a whole lot for sharing this, well, certainly in my view, extremely interesting information - your contribution is super valuable and indeed highly, highly appreciated... it is actually because of people like you who share such expert-info that I keep hanging around on this forum (!).

I have taken the liberty of "spreading" your super-interesting information to two other, very related, threads; the German Der etwas andere SATA-Mod für T42 und Verwandte and the thread 1.8" SATA to 2.5" IDE converter?

Once again, THANKS a whole lot for sharing this... I am almost about to bend myself out of shape of pure happiness, hope and gratefulness. Oliver: Should you ever happen to visit Copenhagen, I surely owe you a big, BIG, BIG

Thanks - here's hope again...

Johan

Hi Johan,
is it working on T43p ?

[Johan]

is it working on T43p ?

Answer: If you are really interested in this topic, I (kindly) suggest (or even insist?) that you read the specific thread linked to in my post above (1.8" SATA to 2.5" IDE converter?), as it will give you some insight in this whole issue (and also so that you don't need to ask questions which have already answered). Reading this thread will also give you answers about misc. T43/p users experience with SATA SSD's in T43/p's, either mounted in the internal HDD bay (with or without the T43/p being modified), and with SSD's in the UtraBay. One post from the thread that may be of your interest is this.

I am completely confident that you will find it worthwhile to spend a bit of time reading!

Johan

[creativefish]

Sorry for being a bit thick, but why wouldn't you just use a PATA 2.5" drive [either ssd for speed or regular hdd otherwise]?

The reason I ask is that shortly I'll be looking for a hard drive for a T42, hence my interest. I originally assumed I would just use an old SATA drive I had lying around...

[Raceboy]

Because there isn't any good PATA SSD's available and the ones which are need a kidney to be sold. Not to mention they are scarce (SSD's, not kidneys).

I bought a Samsung 64GB SSD from X301 and ebay SATA-> microSATA bridge and it works perfectly on my "X32s". I haven't noticed any freezes, BSOD's or other issues with it (copied few movies to check). I installed XP on it but partitioned the drive with W7 install disk: made a partition, W7 creates separate 100MB partition, deleted the other one and then extended that 100MB partition to full size of the SSD. Checked the alignment in windows afterwards and it was aligned. If you install windows onto 2nd partition, it will not be aligned, at least it wasn't in my case when I checked the alignment in windows.
You have to use the 1st partition that W7 creates.

[irus]

Will this drive work with that bridge?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820147134

i suppose this will improve the random read write speeds over the kingston drive by twice.!!

[Johan]

Because there isn't any good PATA SSD's available and the ones which are need a kidney to be sold. Not to mention they are scarce (SSD's, not kidneys).

I bought a Samsung 64GB SSD from X301 and ebay SATA-> microSATA bridge and it works perfectly on my "X32s". I haven't noticed any freezes, BSOD's or other issues with it (copied few movies to check). I installed XP on it but partitioned the drive with W7 install disk: Made a partition, W7 creates separate 100 MB partition, deleted the other one and then extended that 100 MB partition to full size of the SSD. Checked the alignment in Windows afterwards and it was aligned. If you install Windows onto 2nd partition, it will not be aligned, at least it wasn't in my case when I checked the alignment in Windows. You have to use the 1st partition that W7 creates.

I just want to share with the forum-members what raceboy was recently kind to share with me via PM, when I asked raceboy about what specific SSD was used in the succesful "X32s":

The SSD I bought was Samsung MMCRE64G8MPP-0VAL1, Lenovo FRU 41W0520.

It is the 1st gen SSD drive and does not support nor TRIM nor NCQ and I haven't found any firmware update that would enable it like on Samsung 2nd gen drives but since I'm running XP on it and it still performs very good (write performance is still perfect), I don't really worry about it too much.

So, it seems that one of the 1st generation (1.8") Samsung SSD's is apparently working well with the eBay SATA-to-PATA adapter.

The reason for my interest in this issue is, that I have used the same "eBay" (1.8")SATA-to-(2.5")PATA adapter (see the thread 1.8" SATA to 2.5" IDE converter?), and with two different Intel (1.8” SATA) SSD’s; first the X18-M (G2) and more recently one of the 320's in my T42p. Most regrettably, with both these two different Intel SSD's I have experienced very frequent "freezes" under boot, and also sometimes when resuming from sleep-mode. I have tried to install both XP and Windows 7 (both installed from scratch) on the X18-M and with the '320 in my T42p, but I remain having the same freezing issue with both operating systems and with both SSD's... and I don't have a clue about what the cause might be??

I would still very, very much like to get this setup (= a fast 1.8" SATA SSD in the main HDD-bay in the T42p) to work without problems, but I really don't know how to proceed today; do I have a defect in my installation (??), or is the X18-M and the 320-series and the eBay SATA-to-PATA adapter simply not able to work correctly together in the T42p? Because of this I am very eager to hear if anybody has achieved a stable setup with some specific (1.8" SATA) SSD in their T42/p? If so, what specific SSD has been used... and are and tweaks necessary??

Thanks in advance to anybody for sharing!

Johan

[lophiomys]

I have a stable setup with an intel 320 and the microSATA to IDE-44-Pin Adapter, purchased in China. I vaguely remember that I had initial boot problems, when I tried to clone the original HDD to the new SSD with Acronis (now deinstalled from my systems!). I had to give it a second try sing the standard backup and restore procedure.

The other thing could be that your adapter is faulty. Living in paranoia I had purchased several spares, so I would be able to do a quick replacement in the case of troubles, but never needed it.

HTH

/LoPhi

[GACrabill]

I have a stable setup with an intel 320 and the microSATA to IDE-44-Pin Adapter, purchased in China.

Can you provide us with a few more specifics ?
- T42 ?
- Type (xxxx-xxx) ?
- Operating System ?
- SSD size ?
- SSD model number (SSDSA.......) ?
- Do you have a Paging file ?

Do you EVER have BSOD or Freeze problems ?

If you run the Intel Toolbox "Full Diagnostic" test, does it "pass" or does it "freeze" ?

If you run multiple disk intensive tasks at the same time, does the laptop "freeze" ?
(anti-virus scan, MalwareBytes scan, two large files writing to SSD ... all done concurrently)

Thanks for providing your knowledge.

[lophiomys]

No BSODs ever.
I even did a FW Update of the Intel 320 via the microSata-IDE-44Pin-Adapter

In the Code section at the linked site below you should find all your desired information:
First Benchmarks with Intel320 in T42p using the Caddy
[[Somehow the forum system does not want to parse this URL as a Link ???]]

Paging File? Interesting question. Yes there is a Paging File with an current date in the root dir.

[GACrabill]

No BSODs ever. I even did a FW Update of the Intel 320 via the microSata-IDE-44Pin-Adapter
In the Code section at the linked site below you should find all your desired information:
First Benchmarks with Intel320 in T42p using the Caddy

Thanks for the link.

But these two questions are the BIG questions :
(the CrystalDiskMark Benchmarks will not stress the SSD like these two tests)

1. If you run the Intel Toolbox "Full Diagnostic" test, does it "pass" or does it "freeze" ?

2. If you run multiple disk intensive tasks at the same time, does the laptop "freeze" ?
(anti-virus scan, MalwareBytes scan, disk defrag, two large files writing to SSD ... all done concurrently)

Thanks again.

[lordvalumart]

The answer may be as simple as updating your drivers.

I download and installed the Intel chipset driver package here: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_ ... nloadType=

Previously, running a "full diagnostic scan" from the Intel toolbox gave me a BSOD every time. Now I can complete the scan with no problems. My system was pretty stable anyway, so it's hard to be 100% certain that the BSODs have been eliminated for good; but it's looking promising.

[Johan]

The answer may be as simple as updating your drivers.

I download and installed the Intel chipset driver package here: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_ ... nloadType=

Previously, running a "full diagnostic scan" from the Intel toolbox gave me a BSOD every time. Now I can complete the scan with no problems. My system was pretty stable anyway, so it's hard to be 100% certain that the BSODs have been eliminated for good; but it's looking promising.

Thanks very much for sharing this - absolutely highly interesting indeed!!

With reference to your previous posts in this thread (this and this), I notice that you are using the Intel X-18M (G2) in your T42p (just the same setup as I have tried), and I note that you have also suffered from frequent freezes in the past (like I have, too). I will surely install this chipset-driver (update) during the weekend to see if there is any change(s) to the "freeze" behavoiur that I have long been experiencing - with the X18-M (G2) as well as with the 1.8" Intel '320 SATA in my T42p (similar freezes experienced by me under XP as well as under Win 7, both installed from fresh).

What keeps puzzling me is that lophiomys is reporting to have had a stable setup running for long in his T42p (with the Intel '320) - so there HAS to be an explanation to why some people are having difficulties, and others (or, at least ONE other!) have managed to get this setup to run stable?

Again, thanks very much for sharing - this is surely super interesting!!

Johan

[Johan]

Update:

I just installed the above-mentioned chipset-driver (Ver. 6.3.0.1007) on my T42p running Windows 7 Ultimate with the Intel 320 1.8" SATA SSD (P/N SSDSA1NW080G3) installed in the eBay 1.8"-SATA-to-2.5"-PATA adapter. The chipset-driver installation appeared to fail in the first attempt (in my rush I unfortunately didn't note down the exact error-message... but something with mismatch between this software and the installed chipset, I believe?). In a subsequent installation everything went smooth, in the sense that no error messages were received, and the installation seemed to complete as expected. [I made/have a System Restore point from before this driver update, so I guess I could "roll back" and repeat everything, if there's any interest].

Before doing this installation, and according to the Device Manager, e.g. the PCI bus driver version was 6.1.7601.17514 (Driver Date = 21-06-2006), and the Disk Driver version was 6.1.7600.16385 (Driver Data = 21-06-2006). If, before installing the ver. 6.3.0.1007 update linked to above, in the Device Driver chosing the option "Update Driver" (and selecting "Search automatically for updated driver software") Windows would report: "The best driver software for your device is already installed"... ?!?

After installing the ver. 6.3.0.1007 update linked to above, there is however NO change in the Driver Version of the HDD and the PCI driver?!? (I didn't note down all the other driver versions, before and after, just the HDD and the PCI). I don't understand why the drivers aren't updated to the new ver. 6.3.0.1007? Another thing, which I also don't understand, is why the Driver Date of the newest version (6.3.0.1007) is Nov. 24, 2004, while the Driver Date of the older version ( 6.1.7601.17614) is 21-06-2006?

I'm confused... and I confess that I had hoped that this Driver Update could have given hope of a permanent fix...

PS: The Intel SSD Toolbox (ver. 3.0.2) ran on this '320 with no problems, and fast, both before and after this driver "update".

Now what to do

Johan

[lophiomys]

Just for the records, on my T42p with WinXP SP3 and Intel 320 80GB

IDE ATAPI Controller:
82801DBM Ultra ATA Storage Controller 24CA: Intel, 14.11.2003, v5.1.1.1001

Drive:
INTEL SSDSA1NW080G3: Microsoft, 1.7.2001, v5.1.2535.0

HTH
/L