Thinkpads Forum

Title says it.

Does APS work on hard drives in ultrabay? I dont have one to boot off to test, but I just experienced failure of the drive I had sitting in there, for no apparent reason, on a 8 month old drive. Could have been a dud, could have been APS never engaging... would like to rule that out before I drop another bill on a new drive for ultrabay.

There are various opinions about this. You may want to do a search here to find them all.

Not searching is me being an idiot. Sorry.

Looks like I need to track down a HDD with integrated shock protection then. Bleh.

enneract wrote:Does APS work on hard drives in ultrabay?

Basically... yes.

There are some caveats for older systems that haven't had driver updates applied regularly, but otherwise it should be fine.

Cheers,

Bill B.

bill bolton wrote: Basically... yes.

There are some caveats for older systems that haven't had driver updates applied regularly, but otherwise it should be fine.

Cheers,

Bill B.

Er, really?

A quick search, after the feature was reminded to me, resulted in everyone from the IBM documentation to the crazy guy with the apocalypse sign saying that no, it only protected the main drive.

I'm gonna have to experiment, my SATA caddy just showed up, so I am going to boot off it and shake the laptop a bit while playing a video or something.

*results*

Alright, booting off the ultrabay from a random ebay SATA caddy of dubious origin (it doesn't have the same build quality as the ATA caddy from a t40 that I have), the APS system does trigger, however this does not stop any multimedia playback through VLC.

However, it does delay file copying for the length of the trigger. This leads me to believe that VLC is just loading the whole file into RAM, rather than accessing it as it goes. I dont have anything large (like a movie) handy to test this further.

In conclusion, I do think that, even though the documentation seems to say that it does not, the APS system does protect ultrabay drives.

I would need to do a search myself to recall all the opinions that were expressed previously. But what I took from the previous discussions was that in principal a HD in the ultrabay HD caddy was supported by the APS (not initially but the latest releases of APS certainly do). But the HD itself needs to supports certain features/SATA commands (thus, even though the APS shows activity, the HD might not stop correctly). I'm sure there are contradicting opinions around.

Hi enneract,
I would take a look at this thread and also this article from Seagate. If the drive you are using has a built in shock protection like Seagate's G-force system it may be pausing access to the drive and giving you the impression it's the Thinkpad APS system when in fact it's the drive's own built in shock protection system.

Seagate drives with the model number ending in a "G" (i.e. ST9160823ASG) have their G-force system. Even in the ultrabay the Seagate system should activate on any significant movement. Posts on the thread cited about indicate the APS system does not work for drives in the Ultrabay.
Good luck,
DenTP4rm

The drive in question is a WD Scorpio Blue, so no built-in system there.

APS definitely seems to be doing something.

Some time ago there was a post here describing the way of checking if the drive supported ATA commands required for the APS to work correctly. The post can be found here:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 73#p428373

The poster has checked the Hitachi 320GB 7200rpm drive, I've checked my WD 320GB 7200rpm one. Both drives proved to support the relevant commands.

I would say if a drive passes this test and stops if placed in Ultrabay adapter and the notebook is moved, then we can be quite sure it is protected.

enneract wrote:the APS system does trigger, however this does not stop any multimedia playback through VLC.

However, it does delay file copying for the length of the trigger. This leads me to believe that VLC is just loading the whole file into RAM, rather than accessing it as it goes. I dont have anything large (like a movie) handy to test this further.

VLC is just too good, try with WMP, the hang should be noticeable

Cheers

Marin