Thinkpads Forum

How can I find out if this machine supports and will work SATA-300 before I spend the extra money on a SATA-300 vs a SATA-150 drive?

The chipset and specs from IBM appear to mean SATA-300 is available yet I see issues
when people use SSD, but I am hoping thats the reason why.

Does anyone know if a SATA-300 mechanical drive in this machine will reach its potential?

thanks,

-JD

I´m not sure what you mean by "potential". There is this SATA interface (150 or 300) which stands for theoretical speed throughput through the interface. That´s different from the actual performance of a drive (SSD or mechanical). It´s not possible both for mechanical drive and SSD to reach the interface limit as of the current state of art. However, the newer SSDs (which have SATA-300) have higher throughput than the limit of a SATA-150 interface, hence if detached to such an interface, they will not be able to realize their max actual performance. All recent ThinkPads support SATA-300, or to be more precise, all recent SATA-300 drives suitable for a laptop (i.e. 2.5'' or 1.8'' or smaller) are compliant to SATA-150. So if you install such device into a ThinkPad with SATA-150 interface, it will work without problems but probably won´t be able to reach its max performance due to the interface limitation (this performance limitation applies for obvious reasons only to the newer SSDs like the Intel one, not to the current mechanical drives).

Hope this helps

Marin

EDIT: However, I don´t know if the newer ThinkPad models have Sata-300 interface, so that they would be able to fully utilize a very fast SSD like the Intel ones...

AuroraGuy wrote:Does anyone know if a SATA-300 mechanical drive in this machine will reach its potential?

There are no single rotational HDDs that can fully utilize the bandwidth of a SATA-150 interface, so its just not an issue with rotational drives. The best SATA rotational drives will typically top out at around an 80Mbps or so sustained transfer speed.

In the case of an X61/X61s the SATA II command set is supported (so you get NCQ capability) but the the actual transfer maximum speed is more like the SATA I spec, but still higher than any rotational drive can fully utilise.

Cheers,

Bill B.

Thanks

Seems like the ATA-100 or ATA-133 theoretical speeds..


-JD

I'm interested in this question too. I know that X60 has SATA I interface. I read somewhere that some SATA II drives comes with jumper or switch to force it to SATA I. Maybe the SSD hard drive will automatic switch to SATA I once it is attached to a SATA I interface?

Pretty much every SATA SSD available will drop back to SATA-1 speed automatically.