Thinkpads Forum

I'm winding up some T-6x and T-4x rebuilds.

If possible, a Blu-Ray drive would be nice.

I've noticed that after the T-6x series that the Ultrabay connector changed from a wide recessed connector on the right (from the point of view of the rear of the drive) to a small projection from the center.

My questions are:
1. Given that both T-6x and T-4x chipsets supported SATA, are these both SATA interfaces, PCI, PCIe, etc. Or were these "dumbed down" (as in the T-42 harddrive-drive interposer to make it PATA/IDE)? (For the T-61's, I've flashed with Middleton's BIOS.)
2. If these were only made with the small projection type of connector, can they be modified with an old junked T-6x or T-4x CD/DVD drive connectors to work?

Thanks!

Ultrabay's connector for this goes thru 4x, R52 and 6x are the same except thickness for and Rxx & Txx series which are all PATA interface.

T400/T500 started the ultrabay using SATA from point on.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

I saw Blu-Ray drives with USB 3.0 so that would do. USB 2.0 can peak at around 25mb/s from what I experienced from a USB SATA hard drive. A USB IDE HDD's transfer speed is more than good enough to play a 1.5h 1080p Blu-Ray MKV extract which is around 8gb so I guess USB Blu-Ray would do as well. Btw what ThinkPad are you using? Anything before ATI T43/R52 won't handle it as they use AGP GPU and older Pentium M. From what I tried T43 and R52 would do it with Pentium M 780 @ 2.26ghz and ATI GPU with some acceptable lags & lots of heat. For T4x and T6x, the drive plate is not the same. T4x uses a curved plate while T6x uses a straight one so be careful about this drop act if you are OCD and you insist in finding a IDE one for Ultrabay.

wsalomon wrote:I've noticed that after the T-6x series that the Ultrabay connector changed from a wide recessed connector on the right (from the point of view of the rear of the drive) to a small projection from the center.

That connector is not IDE connector, it is the Ultrabay Battery connector, therefore T4x batteries won't work in T6x even though they use Ultrabays with the same name

All but one the T-42's have ATI the M7-32 Radeon 7500 GPU; one (a 15") has the M10-128 Radeon 9600/Fire GL 128 GPU. All have Pentium M 765 2.1 GHz CPUs and 2 GB of RAM running Win 7.

The T-61's have either the nVidia NVS 140M or FX 570M GPU (and have survived long enough and are dated to miss out on the nVidia chip defects), T-9500 CPUs, and 8 GB of RAM running Win 10.

For cosmetics, a well-handled Dremel MotoTool can do wonders, if needed

So getting back to the question...

Looking a little further, I saw a reference that mentioned that Ultrabay Slim (T-4x and T-6x) could take either SATA or PATA devices. COuld it be that is why the connector was wider than that in later Ultrabays, that depending on the pin-out that the inserted device could do either?

I'm gathering that the only Blu-Rays were SATA as they started with the T-4xx's?

Therefore, could it be possible to "hybrid" the SATA BLU-Ray, back to the dual-purpose connector (a Franken-Ray)?

T4* and T6* all use PATA for CD/DVD and HDD ultrabay adapters. If you have an HDD ultrabay adapter with SATA, the signals are converted to PATA. The middle connector present on T6* models is for the serial/parallel adapter (not present on T400 era), and the rightmost gold connector pins are for batteries.

wsalomon wrote:All but one the T-42's have ATI the M7-32 Radeon 7500 GPU; one (a 15") has the M10-128 Radeon 9600/Fire GL 128 GPU. All have Pentium M 765 2.1 GHz CPUs and 2 GB of RAM running Win 7.

The T-61's have either the nVidia NVS 140M or FX 570M GPU (and have survived long enough and are dated to miss out on the nVidia chip defects), T-9500 CPUs, and 8 GB of RAM running Win 10.

I searched up on eBay, the earliest compatible model is T400 which uses the SATA interface, and Blu-ray ROM standard did not come out until 2006 so it is likely that such drive does not exist for 4x and 6x series
I can guarantee that 1080p Blu-ray won't work properly at all on your 7500 T42, and struggles for the FireGL 128 (Unless you have XGA display which there is no point of playing 1080p Blu-ray on it), CPU clock speed in this case really matters. A Pentium M 750 @ 1.86ghz will have trouble keeping up frames and a Pentium M 780 with X300 is just enough to keep the frames aligned with sound...

wsalomon wrote:Therefore, could it be possible to "hybrid" the SATA BLU-Ray, back to the dual-purpose connector (a Franken-Ray)?

No. The original ThinkPad BR drive was an "Enhanced" version which is simply too thick to fit into T series units. It does fit into R6x machines. Having said that, none of these units have the horsepower to deal with BR properly.

If you have an HDD Ultrabay adapter with SATA, the signals are converted to PATA.

This explains why my spare SATA HDD drive runs so slowly.

The middle connector present on T6x models is for the serial/parallel adapter (not present on T400 era).

I wasn't aware this even existed until I looked inside a few minutes go. What devices actually used this?

ajkula66 wrote:

wsalomon wrote:Therefore, could it be possible to "hybrid" the SATA BLU-Ray, back to the dual-purpose connector (a Franken-Ray)?

No. The original ThinkPad BR drive was an "Enhanced" version which is simply too thick to fit into T series units. It does fit into R6x machines. Having said that, none of these units have the horsepower to deal with BR properly.

Is this "enhanced" sized Blue ray player available anywhere? I have the advance dock and their ultrabays are the taller "enhanced" size.

cadillacmike68 wrote:

ajkula66 wrote:No. The original ThinkPad BR drive was an "Enhanced" version which is simply too thick to fit into T series units. It does fit into R6x machines. Having said that, none of these units have the horsepower to deal with BR properly.

Is this "enhanced" sized Blue ray player available anywhere? I have the advance dock and their ultrabays are the taller "enhanced" size.

Try feebay...I've never owned one of these. They seem to be fairly rare.

Good luck.

It is cheaper for you to go for USB Blu-ray drives than IDE UltraBay though...

cadillacmike68 wrote: Is this "enhanced" sized Blue ray player available anywhere? I have the advance dock and their ultrabays are the taller "enhanced" size.

Don't know. The FRU is 39T2853 and it kinda works in a Z61p with 100% CPU-load. Stuttery play and there might be further improvements to be done.