Thinkpads Forum

Just out of curiosity, does the T61(p) support SATA II? Just planning ahead here and looking at different drives. I can get my hands on a Seagate 5400.4 (which has a SATA/300 interface), but I'm not sure if the T61(p) supports that interface.

Any other suggestions for a large (200G) drive which is fast, has low-power consumption and runs quietly?

I know that Hitachi drives, while fast, consume more power and worst of all have that annoying "click" in idle (find that annoying).

Cheers

T61's have the Intel PM965 chipset which has an SATA-300 controller with support of 3 ports.

Reference -
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mobile ... t61_6.html

I wonder if that Seagate is faster than an Hitachi 7K200, which would be my suggestion .... I've had a bunch of 7200rpm Hitachi drives in various machines...no click.

I think the latest generation of Hitachi (7k200) drives have been improved in several respects over previous generations. Haven't heard a peep (or a click) out of either of mine yet. Wouldn't be surprised if they consume less power as well.

I have 6 installed and have installed many others without any click. Maybe the ones I used are defective.

Brad

Thanks for the replies fellas, harryc thanks for the link - quite interesting.

Sorry, I should have mentioned that I had a few Hitachi drives on my T42 (all 7200rpm) and they all had that annoying "click" when powering up from idle or when entering idle mode. Drove me nuts. Other thing is that I've gone through 4 Hitachis on my t42 over the years (3 of which developed drive failure - 2 of which were the 100GB) and I wasn't overly pleased with that. Sure they were quick and powerful, but I've lost confidence in those. Perhaps Hitachi revamped their new offerings, but...

Seagates are great drives. Let us know how you make out with one...

Sure will, but hope you guys don't mind a month or two wait time for a review .... At least I hope to have my t61 sometime by April if I order now from Lenovo Canada...

Harryc wrote:T61's have the Intel PM965 chipset which has an SATA-300 controller with support of 3 ports.

Reference -
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mobile ... t61_6.html

I wonder if that Seagate is faster than an Hitachi 7K200, which would be my suggestion .... I've had a bunch of 7200rpm Hitachi drives in various machines...no click.

For the record, the Hitachi SMOKES the Seagate. It's not even CLOSE.

And here is a quick note Re SATA 1 vs SATA 2.


With the exception of an EXTREMELY high-end SSD drive, you will not see even a 0.00001% performance improvement of SATA 2 vs 1.

Why? It's simply really. The limiting factor for data transfer from a HDD is how fast you can pull data off the HDD platers, not how fast the interface is (which is what the SATA 1 vs 2 is referring to - interface chip transfer speed). Even the old PATA transfer speed at 133Mbs is faster than the fastest HDD out there (*Hitachi 7K200 for those that care to know).


Only an SSD drive with the NAND cells designed to transfer data in parallel mode (READ: SUPER EXPENSIVE - like $2k or more for 64GB) would have a shot at maxing out the SATA 1 interface.

icantux wrote: Sorry, I should have mentioned that I had a few Hitachi drives on my T42 (all 7200rpm) and they all had that annoying "click" when powering up from idle or when entering idle mode. Drove me nuts. Other thing is that I've gone through 4 Hitachi's on my t42 over the years (3 of which developed drive failure - 2 of which were the 100GB) and I wasn't overly pleased with that. Sure they were quick and powerful, but I've lost confidence in those. Perhaps Hitachi revamped their new offerings, but...

I too had an Hitachi 100GB 7200rpm that came with my T60p with the very annoying Hitachi Click-ing - swapped it out with a Seagate Momentus 120GB 7200rpm which is whisper quiet - Here's the official line from Lenovo: Click here: (Sorry - could not resist! )

Thanks for the link. So there's a firmware update for 'clicking' Hitachi drives .. good to know.

Peak2Peak wrote:Here's the official line from Lenovo: Click here: (Sorry - could not resist! )

That links to an update for IDE drives dating from 2005, so its seems unlikely it will do anything for current SATA drives.

Cheers,

Bill B.

bill bolton wrote:That links to an update for IDE drives dating from 2005, so its seems unlikely it will do anything for current SATA drives.

Agree, it is unlikely to do anything for current SATA drives - I really wanted to point to the Hitachi Clicking aspect which forum member: icantux is/had been experiencing - Sorry if I misled anyone otherwise

FYI, the 7K200 does NOT have the clicking issue. And it is substantially quieter than the 7K100 ever was.

Ah neat! Well there's something to consider then!

I find the Seagate's 16MB cache somewhat intriguing though.

Now to figure out which one to get... you guys got me all confused now. LOL!

icantux wrote:Ah neat! Well there's something to consider then!

I find the Seagate's 16MB cache somewhat intriguing though.

Now to figure out which one to get... you guys got me all confused now. LOL!

7K200 is 16MB cache.

And FYI, there is a SATA 2 version, if you insist on that (although like I said earlier, it's meaningless).

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib. ... K200DS.pdf

brentpresley wrote:

7K200 is 16MB cache.

And FYI, there is a SATA 2 version, if you insist on that (although like I said earlier, it's meaningless).

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib. ... K200DS.pdf[/quote]


SATA300 is not completely meaningless. You say yourself that there is a 16MB cache on the drive. If data is requested thats in the cache, then for a very short period of time, the drive can deliver bursts of data something probably close to the SATA300 max. But you are right, it probably wont happen often, depending on your application. For instance if your OS is not smart enough to use RAM and repeatedly requests the same data form the HD.

for reference
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths

toby909 wrote:

brentpresley wrote:
7K200 is 16MB cache.

And FYI, there is a SATA 2 version, if you insist on that (although like I said earlier, it's meaningless).

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib. ... K200DS.pdf

SATA300 is not completely meaningless. You say yourself that there is a 16MB cache on the drive. If data is requested thats in the cache, then for a very short period of time, the drive can deliver bursts of data something probably close to the SATA300 max. But you are right, it probably wont happen often, depending on your application. For instance if your OS is not smart enough to use RAM and repeatedly requests the same data form the HD.

for reference
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths

Do the math. Do you know how quickly a 16MB (megaBYTE) cache can be cleared by a 1.5Gb or 3Gb (GigaBIT) interface?

0.083 s for SATA 1
0.042 s for SATA 2

So the difference b/w the two is LESS than 1/20 of a second. After that, you are completely limited to the HDD plater transfer speed.