Thinkpads Forum

Guys,

It's par for the course for me to receive my new laptops, immediately reformat them, create my own custom builds, and sysprep/ghost. Obsessive Compulsive mode on!

So I receive this beautiful new T60P 2007-9eu with the Intel 82801GBM/GHM ICH7-M Family Serial ATA Storage controller, which loves to Bluescreen my fresh builds when set for AHCI mode in BIOS Config -> Serial ATA.

The only way I can get it to behave is to set it to Compatibility modein BIOS. So, that is what I did, thinking I could switch it back later. But, on switching back to AHCI, BSOD!! again...

I've followed the procedures online, even Installing the newest Intel Chipset support, infinst_autol v. 8.1.1.1001, followed by the special Intel Matrix Storage Manager support.

Following the above procedure, I attempt to switch it back to AHCI mode, and still get a bluescreen.

In a last ditch attempt, I slipstreamed the drivers above, using instructions I found online, into a master Win XP install CD. This did allow me to get beyond the "No hard drive found F3" error on text only setup mode, but still on first boot into GUI, same 07 bluescreen.

There must be a way to fresh-load this thing with AHCI turned on in BIOS , or is it just a pipe dream?

Thanks,

Brian

Dear Brian,

save your effort, it is not worth it. Whatever you do your harddrive will not run in AHCI mode (Native Command Queuing on).
IBM disables NCQ on their drives, so you will have no benefits in having the drive running in AHCI mode. Since I received this information from Hitachi, I run in compatibility mode.
I only found out because I was running a original Hitachi drive with original Hitachi firmware in AHCI mode and the performance just sucked. I guess this is the reason why IBM firmware has NCQ disabled. As soon as I switched the Hitachi drive to compatibility mode, I had the same performance as the IBM drive.

Kind regards,

Wolfgang

yep, freakwave's take on the situation is accurate from everything I've seen on these forums. this thread discusses the issue and from what I can tell there is no reason to be running in AHCI mode:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=26761

So are most of you here running your hard drives in compatability mode?

i run mine on ahci mode. not that there's any benefit to doing so.

i did my share of benchmarking, and from what i can tell, it doesn't seem to matter which setting you choose.

My T60P runs much slower in Compatibility mode than in AHCI and verified it using some HD benchtest tool I found online. NCQ still shows as disabled though.

I did some benchmarks with a pair of HDD's - a 100g 7200 and a 100g 5400 drive. One with Win2003, the other with XP. Both clean OS installs with all drivers.

Compatibility vs AHCI (with drivers) showed no difference in performance when I benchmarked with HD Tach.

heelix wrote:Compatibility vs AHCI (with drivers) showed no difference in performance when I benchmarked with HD Tach.

I did the same test and got exactly the same results. No difference.

heelix wrote:I did some benchmarks with a pair of HDD's - a 100g 7200 and a 100g 5400 drive. One with Win2003, the other with XP. Both clean OS installs with all drivers.

Compatibility vs AHCI (with drivers) showed no difference in performance when I benchmarked with HD Tach.

heelix - what kind of 100g 7200 drive do you have? Seagate or Hitachi? thanks, john

Hitachi