Thinkpads Forum

I am definitely keeping a tab on this thread.

I saw that the FDE model was supported too, but I was wondering if that one could be hacked onto a non-FDE drive, since it's essentially the same model number. Please keep us posted on your progress!

DarkScythe wrote:I am definitely keeping a tab on this thread.

I saw that the FDE model was supported too, but I was wondering if that one could be hacked onto a non-FDE drive, since it's essentially the same model number. Please keep us posted on your progress!

Yes I will, I'm going after this very aggressively, as I want to know the facts of what we can and cannot accomplish. Also due to the fact that I have been a loyal IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad customer for many years, purchasing & deploying a huge volume of units for my large scale enterprise I'm going to tap my resources on this issue.

Keep in mind also that Lenovo doesn't exclusively use TravelStar drives anymore these days; it seems that ever since the IBM hard drive line was acquired by Hitachi and the personal computer line by Lenovo, Lenovo has decided to keep their options open and do with hard drives what they do with all of the other components in their systems (keyboards, LCDs, optical drives, etc.): have more than one source in the pipeline.

My T60p came with a Seagate 7200.1 Momentus, for example. I have also heard of some ThinkPads coming with Toshiba HDDs straight from the factory. If ThinkWiki and the Hitachi rep who claims that Lenovo drives have special firmware for HDAPS no-flush-cache-on-head-park support are correct, then wouldn't Seagate and Toshiba also have to develop special/custom versions of firmware for the drives that they sell to Lenovo as well? I suppose this is possible and likely, but it seems less likely to me than if Hitachi were Lenovo's only source for hard drives.

On the other hand, the label on my Seagate drive has a "Lenovo P/N" printed directly on the label (not a separate sticker), so it's obvious that Seagate at the very least prints custom sticker labels for the disks they deliver to Lenovo.

Side note: I recently had my stock 100GB Seagate develop a bad sector, which I was able to re-map to a spare using a Seagate diagnostic application, but IMO when drives start showing bad sectors, I don't trust them anymore...so Lenovo sent me a replacement under warranty. And what they sent me was a 100GB Hitachi 7K200! I would have expected to get the 7K100 model. This thing is a screamer, faster AND quieter than the Seagate it is replacing believe it or not (I couldn't at first)!

-- Nathan

Well, I know Lenovo doesn't use only Hitachi drives, their firmware file lists several other manufacturers in it.
Firmware is just software - this is a whole lot easier to make custom than hardware. The drives themselves are all the same, it's just when IBM/Lenovo gets it, they slap on the IBM/Lenovo FRU sticker on it and load up their custom firmware.

My current T60 actually still appears to have warranty too, but I doubt I can ask for the 200GB HD.. although, mine is a -CTO model. They probably have a hardware list paired up with the serial number though. Actually, since it's still under warranty I suppose I could also have them fix the noisy heatsink/fan problem, but I don't think it's worth the hassle.

I'm actually a little confused since I dug up a specification paper from this thread: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=47004

On page 100 of this document, you will find that there is the IDLE IMMEDIATE command!

The only thing that concerns me that the paper says "7K200 SATA OEM Specification".

What does OEM mean in this context? Is this spec meant for drives going to other big vendors (IBM/Lenovo) only? Is that what we get from a retailer or not?

Meanwhile, I also tried HDAPS on my computer by putting the sensitivity to very high and slightly moving the laptop.
The HDAPS would kick in with the drive making click noises when being unloaded/reloaded.
So something seems to work here. The question remains if the drive flushes the cache before or not.
Heck, I wish there was some software to test whether this IDLE IMMEDIATE command works or not.

I've got a bad feeling that Hitachi support quickly wanted to get rid of me by just rephrasing what's already written in the ThinkWiki.

DarkScythe wrote:Firmware is just software - this is a whole lot easier to make custom than hardware. The drives themselves are all the same, it's just when IBM/Lenovo gets it, they slap on the IBM/Lenovo FRU sticker on it and load up their custom firmware.

Yes, of course. I didn't say that I thought it was impossible. My line of thinking (which is of course not anything to base any solid conclusions on, heh) went more like this: Hitachi's drive divisions and Lenovo's personal computers both used to be under the umbrella of a single company: IBM. While under this common umbrella, ThinkPads exclusively used IBM hard drives (which was decidedly UNLIKE how they handled all other ThinkPad components, where they always retained multiple vendors/sources for different parts, but which also made sense given that doing business with other HDD vendors would be a conflict of interest for them, so to speak), and during this time both divisions were able to work closely with one another to develop proprietary, in-house, exclusive technologies that benefited each other, such as the Active Protection System.

At the point both companies split off from their common parent, a foundation was already in place which allowed maintenance of this cooperatively-developed feature to continue: the specs already existed, the code was already written and in production, etc. However, since ThinkPads and TravelStar drives are now in the hands of separate corporate entities, it makes sense for Lenovo to seek out backup supplies for the hard drive component of their computers, but at the same time these new vendors would be having to start from scratch to implement a feature in their firmwares (which don't share a codebase with Hitachi's firmware, presumably) that the TravelStar team has already had in production for a few years.

Now, money is a very powerful language, and I'm sure that assuming Seagate, Toshiba, and their ilk signed on as HDD suppliers for APS-equipped ThinkPads, there were contracts involved which were lucrative enough for the HDD manufacturers to pursue engineering a custom firmware solution for Lenovo. But at this point in the thought experiment, I honestly don't know which explanation Occam's Razor would favor: that Lenovo's hard drives require special firmware for APS to work properly and that APS doesn't send a standard ATA command that all hard drives adhering to the standard would recognize and respond to, and thus Seagate, Toshiba, and whoever else supplies to Lenovo all had to custom-engineer firmware specifically for them; or that APS gets by with the standard ATA command set and that there is really nothing special at all about the drives that ship with APS-equipped Lenovo laptops.

DarkScythe wrote:My current T60 actually still appears to have warranty too, but I doubt I can ask for the 200GB HD..

Note that the 7K100 and 7K200 designations are not for individual Hitachi drive models, but rather for drive model series. So, just to make sure there is no confusion here, Lenovo replaced my 100GB Seagate with a 100GB 7K200-series drive; so, like-for-like in terms of rotational speed and capacity. The 7K100 also came in several different capacities, not just 100GB. The 7K200 is the later/newer series of TravelStar 7200RPM drives. Since my T60p I believe was a model (2623DDU) that was discontinued before the 7K200 series even saw the light of day, I simply did not expect that Lenovo would have a drive from this series listed as a valid FRU for my system. Thus, I was (pleasantly) surprised to receive it.

The exact model of drive they sent me is HTS722010K9SA00.

-- Nathan

I've got to correct myself.
UNLOAD FEATURE and IDLE IMMEDIATE are not to be seen separately.

According to http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDo ... A8-ACS.pdf
page 131, UNLOAD FEATURE is a feature of the IDLE IMMEDIATE command.
It says:

"IDLE IMMEDIATE is mandatory for devices implementing the Power Management feature set. The Unload Feature of this command is optional."

So, if something is optional in the ATA spec, you can count on vendors cutting their cost and not implementing it.

However, according to the spec, if IDLE IMMEDIATE supports UNLOAD FEATURE can be examined by querying the drive programmatically.

We might just have to write a little assembler program to talk to the drive in order to find out

Hallo all,

having had some frustrating experience with unwilling support staff and due to the lack of material from which reliable information could be extracted, I decided to do my own investigation with regard to the question if any non-IBM/Lenovo drive can possibly offer full support for HDAPS.

Anyone interested please bear with me:

Disclaimer: I don't take any responsibility for any damage or loss that may result out of following my procedure nor do I guarantee that the procedure and the results derived from it are correct.

It is known from ThinkWiki (http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Active_Protection_System) that for HDAPS to work properly, drives must support the ATA command IDLE IMMEDIATE with ramp/head unload feature.

According to http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDo ... A8-ACS.pdf (ATA specification), IDLE IMMEDIATE is usually implemented for drives meant to be used in portable computers, but the UNLOAD FEATURE support of this command is optional (page 131).

Now, the capabilities of a drive can be queried by another ATA command which is IDENTIFY DEVICE.
Usually, tools like PC Wizard and the like don't evaluate the full output from this command, thus only displaying device name, firmware version etc.

But: IDENTIFY DEVICE returns a lot more than that. It's a whopping 512 bytes of data, and the 13th bit of WORD 84 and 87 tells us if IDLE IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD FEATURE is supported and enabled (bit set == 1) or not (bit not set == 0), See pages 94 and 96 of the spec paper.

Hence, we only need a tool that allows us to directly issue ATA commands to the drive.

I used ATADEMO, available from http://www.ata-atapi.com/products.html. The free demo version will be more than sufficient for the given purpose.

Make a bootable DOS floppy or USB stick (don't make a CD since ATADEMO will not run if it cannot write to the medium) and put ATADEMO.EXE and atademo.hlp on it.

Armed in this way, we can approach our Thinkpad:

1. Disconnect/remove all hard disks you're not interested in. The tool will only recognize and operate on
internal drives, i. e. no external USB, etc.
1. Enter BIOS and put the SATA configuration into compatibility mode
2. boot from your medium
3. if you have just the internal HD and the CDROM, invoke "ATADEMO.EXE P0" on the DOS prompt
4. ATADEMO.EXE will come up with a lot of verbose blurb, so just press SPACE once and wait until you get to ATADEMO's command line prompt: "?Cmd ?"
5. At that prompt, just enter "ID" and press ENTER. A lot of stuff will appear on the screen.
6. Use PageUp/PageDn to navigate the output. Verify that the information indeed belongs to your drive (WORDS 27-46 contain the drive model name), then locate WORDS 84 and 87 (the numbers on the left of the screen. Numbers are not sorted, so keep searching). Usually, the values given there should be identical. For my drive, they were both 6163H.
7. Fire up the Windows calculator in scientific mode, set it to "Hex" and enter the number (without the trailing "H") into the calculator.
8. Put it to "Bin" mode and you'll get the bits. In my case I got 110000101100011.
9. The rightmost bit is bit number 0 where you start counting from right to left. Hence, bit number 13 has value 1 in both WORD 84 and 87.
10. When done, reboot, go into BIOS and reenable AHCI mode for the drive in case it was set before.


That means: unlike Hitachi support, my drive itself reports IDLE IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD FEATURE supported and enabled, which should allow HDAPS to work as expected.


Thanks for listening.

Quagmyre

Wow, what a quest lol
And a very verbose result to boot!
Thanks for all the information.

Everything sounds great and feasible and sounds like it makes sense. If you're doing it by USB key though, does the key need to be completely empty, or can you put it in a stick with other data on it? I've never actually bothered with using the key for these things because the programs usually say they need the key clear of other data or something.. it's a waste of all that space.

Also, regarding your Binary, the right-most bit is a "1" not a 0.. unless I'm reading it wrong.

Anyway, so in the end we know that your drive (is it safe to assume that means every drive you the 7k200 series should also have this?) has all 3 of the features needed, but do you still need the firmware to invoke the instructions, or is installing the APS software enough?

Thanks again!

DarkScythe wrote:Wow, what a quest lol
And a very verbose result to boot!
Thanks for all the information.

Everything sounds great and feasible and sounds like it makes sense. If you're doing it by USB key though, does the key need to be completely empty, or can you put it in a stick with other data on it? I've never actually bothered with using the key for these things because the programs usually say they need the key clear of other data or something.. it's a waste of all that space.

Also, regarding your Binary, the right-most bit is a "1" not a 0.. unless I'm reading it wrong.

Anyway, so in the end we know that your drive (is it safe to assume that means every drive you the 7k200 series should also have this?) has all 3 of the features needed, but do you still need the firmware to invoke the instructions, or is installing the APS software enough?

Thanks again!

The rightmost bit is bit number 0, i. e. where you start to count (right to left). Bit numbers go from 0 to 15 with each bit having the possible values 1 or 0.Seems like I was not clear enough on that. I edited my last post in order to make that a little clearer, so thanks for the input.

As for the boot medium, it doesn't have to be empty nor will any data on it suffer. It needs to be writable though because ATADEMO.EXE will try to create a log file on it. If it can't do this, it won't run (learned by painful experience).

As for HDAPS, everything should be there now:

1. Thinkpad with motion sensor
2. ThinkVantage Active Protection Software which reads data from the motion sensor and issues commands to the hard drive whenever it sees fit
3. and finally the drive being capable of executing the commands issued by the Active Protection software which was the last point to be clarified.

Assuming that IDLE IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD FEATURE is the only crtitical feature among otherwise standard ATA commands which HDAPS needs to work properly (which is likely, but not 100% certain), we're done here.

I'd say there is a good chance that all newer TravelStar drives will support IDLE IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD FEATURE und hence - according to the theory above - wouldn't need the original IBM firmware to have HDAPS working.

HDAPS was developed a couple of years ago, and back at that time probably only original IBM drives would support the necessary commands in their firmware.

This forum, and threads like this, and users like you all are the reason I bought a ThinkPad. Great work!

Apologies for bumping an old thread, but I figured I'd put in my results here for those that might be curious.

I just got a new Hitachi Travelstar 7k320 320GB drive installed into my T60, and I followed Quagmyre's instructions. It seems this drive also has it enabled (Same 6163H word value for words 84 and 87.) I'm not sure you actually needed to calculate the binary for it since under ATADEMO's output for word 87 it said Bit13 - IDLE IMMED unload - Supported - Enabled.

Anyway, just thought I'd post the results, since this is probably the next drive everyone will want.

DarkScythe wrote:...

Anyway, just thought I'd post the results, since this is probably the next drive everyone will want.

Or DarkScythe, they may want to look at this drive. I wanted the 'G' drop protection but didn't like having to use software to achieve the results.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148336

Just installed 2 of them within the last day.

I have just tested my drive with the above procedure.

The drive is a Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7200RPM.

Both WORDs 84 and 87 have the value of 6163h (bit 13 is set) meaning that the drive supports the IDLE IMMEDIATE command with UNLOAD FEATURE. It should therefore work correctly with APS.

----------------------

PS. I worked out a somewhat different way to get the ATADEMO tool working without a floppy drive or a bootable USB stick. You just need a CD-R/RW disc. I've used the Ultimate Boot CD found here:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

First, download the CD. Go to the "Customizing UBCD" section of the site and follow the instructions but instead of adding or change anything in the "custom" directory, extract the ATADEMO.zip file into a "atademo" directory in the root of the CD.

Rebuild the iso (follow the instructions) and burn the CD.

Reboot.

From the menu, choose "DOS/Linux Boot Disks" and then the "Free DOS Boot Disk" and wait until it starts up. Choose "Browse" or enter "VC" at the command prompt to enter the Volkov Commander.

Now copy the atademo directory from the CD (T: drive) to a RAM disk (Q: drive).

Quit the Volkov Commander and start the ATADEMO tool from the Q: drive. Since Q: is a RAM disk, the tool will be able to create its log files and work as expected.

I was about to install APS, but after reading page 1 of this thread, I thought it might not be a good idea. Then continuing to page 2, I see it should be OK to install it with my 7K320. Excellent investigative work, guys!