Thinkpads Forum

I replaced my hard drive with a 7200 Seagate drive (ST9160823AS),
I noticed my drive was not performing well, and found some tips that I have applied, but I
am unsure if all is what it is supposed to be.

Here is what I did, I removed the drive and removed the jumper, according to some
post this puts the drive in SATA II mode, yet the T60 does not support SATA II,
but then again I managed to boot and the drive seems to work.

Should I leave the jumper off ? or does this mean my T60 does not supports SATA II
(8744HDG)


Then In my BIOS I set the DRIVE to Compatibility mode ,
since this will turn off NCQ (Native command queueing), this seemed to make my OS
more responsive, whenever there was disk activity on the T60 (AHCI MODE), I could do nothing but I had to wait for the disk activity to complete (serialized).
(Some post mentioned that IBM removes the NCQ on the IBM drives, and a method to remove NCQ
on NON IBM drives are to set the BIOS to compatibility mode).


I am not convinced yet that my DRIVE is optimal as is should be, I did some tests with
HD Tune, and the results were pretty much the same:

AHCI on:
Min: 27.9 MB/s
Max: 56.9 MB/s
Avg: 44.8 MB/s
Access Time: 14.6 ms
Burst Rate: 53.2 MB/s
CPU Usage: 14.5%

Compatible Mode
Min: 29.7 MB/s
Max: 57.0 MB/s
Avg: 45.2 MB/s
Access Time: 14.7 ms
Burst Rate: 89.1 MB/s
CPU Usage: 3.3%


I am also wondering what Client Security Solution has an impact on the DISK performance,
I am not sure how the Client Security Solution Disk encryption works.

Please post some Thoughts comments.

thank you.

Running VISTA not XP.

I've benchmarked hard drives in my T60p both with and without the SATA jumper set, and with and without Compatibility mode set in the BIOS. I've never been able to detect a performance difference no matter what I do.

The numbers you're seeing appears to be about correct for your drive. Check out this benchmark I found on another forum.

Thank you Rons,

I am definitely leaving my drive in computability mode, as my system does feel more responsive
(Native Command Queueing being bypassed)

That is nice to know as I am soon to upgrade my harddrive in my new T60. If only it supported SATAII
then I would upgrade to SSD , but then again I can get a bigger drive for less money going after normal SATA drives.

Lenovo really did a bad job optimizing the T60, bad fan/heatsink being the main concern and SATAII missing being the other.

wayneforrest wrote:Thank you Rons,

I am definitely leaving my drive in computability mode, as my system does feel more responsive
(Native Command Queueing being bypassed)

Have you noticed an BSOD when you come out of a hibernation while the drive is in compatibility mode? I recently installed a 500gb seagate drive and set the drive as compatibility mode and got a BSOD when coming out of Hibernation. I set the drive back to AHCI and no BSOD. I would love to keep it in compatibilty mode for more response, but don't want to deal with BSOD if not needed.

I do not have that problem in compatibility mode; although I have only suspend to ram once
since my last format of the hard drive that was done recently.

I have also looked at updating the drive firmware with lenovo's firmware, but I am not sure
if that will "kill" my drive,so I am not considering this at the moment; maybe someone else can confirm that it is safe to update the firmware of a drive that is a NON-IBM drive. This can probably be a fix for your problem with the BSOD, but I am guessing.

one thing that i read on another post is that i might need to turn off the turbo memory, which i did not do before using compatability mode. I will try that and post my results.

I recently upgraded my stock 100GB Hitachi 5400 rpm to the Hitachi Travelstar 7K320 and here are my results.
The new drive is running in "Compatible" mode. Booting / running programs is literally night and day compared to the old drive. Very happy with the upgrade. (Recently came with the $20 Rebate)

Before:




After:

How interesting, the 7K320 has better access time than the 7200.3 (installed in my ThinkPad)... And it was supposed to be the other way around...