T61 -SATA Mods-

[cadillacmike68]

Can someone distill the whole T61 -SATA Mods- thing WRT Win XP?

Is it BIOS mods, new XP drivers, or both, or something else??? I have seen sites with BIOS Mods, but only for widescreen T61s and my wife's and any I get for me will be 4:3 ratio. Am I SOL if I don't get a widescreen T61?

Are the drivers (if there are any, readily available?

Can you use Acronis (here we go again) to clone a platter & head HDD to an SSD?

Thanks in advance.

[Backslashnl1]

I think you're referring to the Middleton bios... the 4:3 T61 is also supported.
You only have to flash this modified bios to enable Sata2 speed on your T61. And off course, you should install the sata (intel matrix storage console) driver.

[ajkula66]

Can you use Acronis (here we go again) to clone a platter & head HDD to an SSD?

In my not-so-modest experience, cloning a rotational drive to an SSD is asking for trouble...

[cadillacmike68]

So it's both a BIOS mod and new drivers. Yes it was Middleton and Zender, i think that i saw.

And yes, cloning to an SSD seems illogical, so it's a fresh install, but Tuus (Don) has XP Discs with SP3 and SATA drivers already prepped, so it might not be that bad.

I definitely have to do this on a "spare" or "my" T61 (which I don't have yet). If I FUBAR hers in the middle of this PhD study, there'll be an atomic blast.

[ajkula66]

None of my business, but why would you put XP on a SSD, especially on machine that is perfectly capable of W7...

[cadillacmike68]

None of my business, but why would you put XP on a SSD, especially on machine that is perfectly capable of W7...

Maybe I don't like 7 (or vista for that matter). I'm thinking of getting one T61 with 7 for my wife so she has the latest, but i don't need it - yet... It's still bloated compared to XP.

[ajkula66]

Maybe I don't like 7 (or vista for that matter). I'm thinking of getting one T61 with 7 for my wife so she has the latest, but i don't need it - yet... It's still bloated compared to XP.

I understand the sentiment entirely but...XP is not SSD-friendly, and will never behave as well as W7 on it, even after major tweaking.

[TuuS]

I agree with George, I'd never select XP, but many people do use it on an SSD so it is quite doable. I can also certainly understand how someone that has been using XP day in and day out, and is busy fighting for our country wouldn't want to learn a new OS if they were happy with XP, but you're still going to have some research to d getting the drive properly setup, but once you get your partition properly aligned, and make sure windows doesn't do crazy things like disc defrag and disc caching that are no longer necessary and even harmful to the drive, then you'll probably be ok.

Also just to be clear, the windows setup disc I'm sending you will allow you to install XP from scratch without disabling AHCI in your bios. Using a regular XP disc you'd have to either slip the drivers in using a floppy disc, or rig up a floppy disc emulator which can be problematic, or install the drivers after windows is installed then enable them with a registry edit. The modded disc isn't needed, but it sure makes the process go smoothly and I'm happy to share the work I did on it with the community, or explain how I did it using a great freeware app called nLite.

Also, you might consider making two partitions on your SSD then you can install vista or seven in the other and use them in dual boot. This way you can try the newer version and see if you like it at your own pace without making any commitment. This is what I did when vista first came out and for the first month I rarely used vista, but every now n then I got curious and tried it. Within a few months I found myself rarely using XP at all and I currently have it installed on my "daily driver", but I don't even recall the last time I used it.

[cadillacmike68]

I did bring my ThinkPad USB FDD with me (and i think there's 1 plus an original Ultrabay FDD in what I bought from Harry) so I'll have that if needed, which i won't.

The mil laptops are all vista or 7 and i can't stand them for admin tasks and file organization. Plus they have them locked up tighter than a drum so i can't even change the time on the pc!!!

If they would put an XP look & feel to the new OS, I'd be more amenable to it...

[cadillacmike68]

Maybe I don't like 7 (or vista for that matter). I'm thinking of getting one T61 with 7 for my wife so she has the latest, but i don't need it - yet... It's still bloated compared to XP.

I understand the sentiment entirely but...XP is not SSD-friendly, and will never behave as well as W7 on it, even after major tweaking.

I don't even have an SSD at present, but by next year they should be less expensive and I'll have time to sort out win 7 when I'm back home. I think I'll leave the SSD stuff to my experimental machine, when i get it.

[Cigarguy]

One of the reasons I'd steer a lot of folks away from SSD and XP is that it's slightly more difficult to install. However you should have NO problem with the disks that TuuS is sending you. Also you're more competent than most. So go for it.

[cadillacmike68]

One of the reasons I'd steer a lot of folks away from SSD and XP is that it's slightly more difficult to install. However you should have NO problem with the disks that TuuS is sending you. Also you're more competent than most. So go for it.

Thanks. I'm pretty good at the HW & SW of stuff that i own. The only machine i ever FUBAR'd really good is that old ThinkPad 760LD with the 90MHz Pentium I CPU. I completely forgot the PWs and jumpered the reset blocks (It helps when you have the manuals and work for the company which i did at the time). It then proceeded to boot, but reboots itself after loading DOS 6.3 from a FDD. It doesn't seem to like the HDDs any more (either of the two). Plus, the batteries (2) are deader than saddam, and I don't feel like resurrecting it at the present. I may dispose of it for parts eventually. It has 2 power supplies, maxed RAM of 40MB, CD, FDD, 2 HDDs, 2 (dead) batteries, manuals, and all the old DOS, OS2 & Win driver updates on diskette.

[miro_gt]

should you get a nice SSD, such as the Samsung 830 series, you would not have to do tweaking and such, that in other case you should, to get the performance. What you're missing with XP compared to W7 is trim, but again depending on the SSD you choose that may not be relevant at all. Some manufacturers have implemented their own methods of dealing with partially filled pages on the SSD that dont require the OS to tell the SSD controller what and when to do it (i.e. smart garbage collection algorithms), so statements like XP is not SSD friendly or that those would underperform under XP are just silly.

IMO, it's not the OS that is causing problems with SSDs, it's the SSDs that suck most of the times. So Microsoft has tried to help out ( with W7) with the problems that a moderate SSD would experience, but that's just a work around the problem to begin with. New-ish technology, people still learn how to make those, some succeed, some keep making the same mistakes (cough .. OCZ .. ). By far Samsung beats all with their last drives, and should you ask then I can provide link with test comparison of different SSD from different manufacturers against each other.

Here I would also clarify that AHCI mode works fine under XP, and most if not all Intel SSDs require it to operate. AHCI is not required for Samsung SSDs though, and frankly with or without it there's hardly any difference, go test for yourself.

[cadillacmike68]

I read up on TRIM. I wonder how long an SSD drive is supposed to last under moderate to heavy use. These things have a finite # of writes they can take. Best is to load the OS and core apps, and put All Else on another HDD.

Problem is the page (swap) file. I think that has to be on the boot volume, and that gets a LOT of writes. This is where a unix or linux install would be better because the page file can get its own partition, which could be a separate HDD (but then you'd have to have it in the computer all the time).

Time will tell. Other than a couple of used and abused SCSI disks back in the early 90s (which didn't fail but were sometimes hard to start), I've only had 2 semi modern HDDs go bad. The original one in my i1411, and my wife's first T30 HDD. Both machines have new drives in them and still run.

[miro_gt]

the 256gb samsung 830 outwrites all others by at least factor of 3 (that is three times !!!), including some SLC drives such as Intel x25-e. It also keeps average write speed at least twice as fast as the others.

While I'm not associated with Samsung in any way, I can clearly say that this drive is amazing. The 512GB variant is a bit slower than the 128 and the 256GB ones. The 64GB one is slower by default.

BTW, the test is still ongoing. There are couple people that are doing it with software that creates various size files in the amount of ~2.5TB per day and then re-writes on top, so some has ran it almost an year already non-stop.

Stay away from OCZ drives, sadly from Mtron drives as well. I had high expectations for Mtron though.

page file on the SSD is not a problem at all, if you still run one. I dont. Most small writes are cashed by the OS before being written to the drive, being HDD or SSD, at least with NTFS file system.

cheers.

[Cigarguy]

I'm running with 5 SSD in various systems. All are running Win 7. IMO, trim is important as is garbage collection. After running WEI on Win 7 it sets this automatically, disable hibernation and defrag on that drive. Because SSD are all flashed based they all have a limited read/write cycles. The idea behind trim and garbage collection is to even out usage been all the flash cells so that no particular section is being used all the time with possible result being uneven wear. It's the reason that hibernation is disabled and, when SSD was much more expensive, disabling hibernation will also free some much needed disk space.

Having said that, modern SSD are much faster, robust, and affordable than they used to by. As of today, if you are willing to look around, 120 GB SSD can be had for $70-$100.

While Samsung and Intel SSD are considered to be superior. I don't subscribe to the theory that the rest are crap. I've used my SSD in various conditions and used them hard. So far no negative affect or failures. Only problem I had was an early model Corsair Force 3 120 GB SSD that was prone to random BSOD. This was due to problematic early Sandforce 22XX firmware. IMO, Sandforce released this hardware to early without doing proper debugging. Once all my SSDs have been upgraded to the new firmware I have not experienced any trouble.

With modern SSD, buy the cheapest that is one sale, use it abuse it and enjoy. All my data is backed up so failures don't keep me awake at night. Also, chances are a typical SSD will out live a HDD under identical usage conditions. Under critical or enterprise usage (where you don't pay for it yourself and downtime is $$$), yeah by all means spend more money on more (sometimes much more) expensive drives.

[ajkula66]

should you get a nice SSD, such as the Samsung 830 series, you would not have to do tweaking and such, that in other case you should, to get the performance. What you're missing with XP compared to W7 is trim, but again depending on the SSD you choose that may not be relevant at all. Some manufacturers have implemented their own methods of dealing with partially filled pages on the SSD that dont require the OS to tell the SSD controller what and when to do it (i.e. smart garbage collection algorithms), so statements like XP is not SSD friendly or that those would underperform under XP are just silly.

While I haven't gotten to testing Samsung 830 yet, I've had XP on a variety of SSDs (Intel, OCZ, Kingston, Crucial...) and had *always* gotten random freezes which annoyed the heck out of silly old me. Once W7 got installed, the troubles were gone.

XP was never meant to be installed on SSDs, and as much as there are zillions of tweaks all over the web available to improve the performance of that combination, I deem it to be less-than-desirable on hardware that can support W7 in the first place.