Thinkpads Forum

Preface: I've had my T60 15" since Feb of 2006. Best purchase of my life!

I've been reading the forum on secondary hard drives. I just placed my purchase for the Ultrabay SATA HD adapter, so I can put my current T60 100GB SATA hard drive into the adapter. I was looking at prices on NewEgg for 160GB 5400rpm SATA drives, when I came across this:

TOSHIBA MK1637GSX 160GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Notebook Hard Drive - OEM
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822149058

Does anyone know if I can put in a SATA II drive in the T60? It's not that much more than the regular SATA150 drivers (1.5GB/s). In fact, the Hitachi Travelstar (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822145113) costs more, but the seek time is 1ms faster.

I can't think of a reason why both of the drives you mention shouldn't work in the SATA adapter.

I haven't seen any individual drives reach the 1.5Gbps limit of SATA I, so whether they run at SATA I or II speeds won't really matter. SATA II drives will work on a SATA I controller, so whether the planar board supports SATA I or II is probably moot.

BTW: SATA (at least SATA II) allows cascading to a multi-drive array (4 drives I think) so the speed may be important for that. A very fast SATA drive (desktop) will yield a max throughput of ~750Mbps so if you put four of those together the 3.0Gbps would be helpful.

-darren

Yes, the hard drive will work in the T60. The 945 chipset supports SATA I (and you can plug SATA II into SATA I) and also the 945 mobile chipset supports many SATA II features. But, the 3.0Gb/s transfer rate is not one of them.

dsalyers wrote:Yes, the hard drive will work in the T60. The 945 chipset supports SATA I (and you can plug SATA II into SATA I) and also the 945 mobile chipset supports many SATA II features. But, the 3.0Gb/s transfer rate is not one of them.

Darn, so there's really no advantage to getting the Toshiba SATA II drive. I've read many articles, and overall -- at least with respect to today's technology -- the benefits aren't significant. I'll go to the SATA I 150 drive. Thank you all!