Sata 1.5 vs Sata 3.0

[johnp126]

We are having issues with T61p/T60 with new drives from Western Digital and Seagate. they do not seem to work in these models. I have searched and found info that you can use a jumper on 2 pins but that also did not work.

Interestingly we found that in Vista 64 on a t61p the system would not see or be able to use the drive, when we used a Windows 7 64 boot hard disk it did see the drive. The systems that don't work ask for a driver for the drive but there does not seem to be one. Automatically finding it does not work and there are no drivers on their sites. the 2 drives are:

WD 500GB WD500BEVT
SEAGATE MOMENTUS 7200.4 320GB ST9320423AS

Best as we can tell we can only use certain 250gb or 160gb drives, anything would be a help. Is this a bios or operating system or drive controller or drive issue?

Thanks

[RealBlackStuff]

All those hard drives should work.
The trick is to set BIOS to SATA compatibility mode during install, and when finished, set it back to AHCI.
There is no need to set any jumpers.
A warning against the WD Scorpio 500: if it is the Scorpio Black, people complain about bad vibrations of the HD.
Get the 5400rpm version (Scorpio Blue), and you'll be fine.

PS: those machines only run at SATA 1.5.

[frankausmtank]

The trick is to set BIOS to SATA compatibility mode during install, and when finished, set it back to AHCI.

Is this really still necessary with vista? I'd expect SATA to work in native mode out of the box on a less than 3 year old OS.

[RealBlackStuff]

We are talking hardware here (the BIOS), not software (like XP or Vista or W7).

[bill bolton]

SEAGATE MOMENTUS 7200.4 320GB ST9320423AS

I've had one of these in my T61 for over a year now, under both Vista Ultimate x64 and Win 7 Ultimate x64. I don't recall having to do anything special to get it to work.

Cheers,

Bill

[richk]

I use those drives with ACHI and no settings are required

[TTY]

Are you trying to use these new hard drives as second hard drives in the UltraBay Slim with a Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter
(P/N 40Y8725 or 26R9246)? The Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter's manual says:

The adapter supports only the 2.5-in. ThinkPad Serial ATA Hard Disk
Drive. It does not support ThinkCentre® hard disk drives, Lenovo China
hard disk drives or hard disk drives from other companies.

[johnp126]

We use in both situations in the bay and in the std as an upgraded drive. Never had a problem before, last time i remember an issue was with PATA drives in T43 you'd get a bios issue and have to bypass it with ESC key.

[SHoTTa35]

I'm using the WD drive and it works fine here.

[frankausmtank]

We are talking hardware here (the BIOS), not software (like XP or Vista or W7).

Your suggested approach was (if I understood it correctly),
1) setting the disc to compatibility mode
2) installing windows and sata drivers
3) setting the disc mode back to ahci

, which is the common method to install xp, due to lack of out-of-the-box SATA support, on T60's and later models. I haven't touched a windows system in years and frankly couldn't believe that a vista install still needed compatibility mode (in fact, even a ~3.5 years old debian etch installs in ahci mode just fine). So, no, we're talking software (lack of sata drivers on the CD) and I don't quite get your argument.

Anyway, a quick google search confirmed that vista (on certain chipsets at least) does indeed not install in ahci mode without additional drivers.

[TTY]

I believe that i read somewhere, that when using the Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter, although a SATA disk is used, along the way to the CPU, the data travels over parallel ATA. For parallel ATA to be able to see disk capacity over 128 GB, an ATA-6 interface is necessary. ATA-6 uses UDMA 5. Therefore, check that DMA is turned on for the IDE channel in Windows device manager.