Thinkpads Forum

Hi Folks,

I just got a cheap drive adapter for my cd bay in my T410 - awesome! These things only cost around $11 on ebay, and it seems to work wonderfully. I have a 7200rpm 500GB drive in there right now.

Now I'm wondering what the hit on my battery life is likely to be. Any ideas?

I'm not sure if windows allows you to have different spin-down settings for the different drives - probably not. So in addition to figuring out what the impact on my battery life will be, I'm wondering if there are any other battery-saving settings I might use to minimize that impact.

thanks!

Now I'm wondering what the hit on my battery life is likely to be. Any ideas?

That depends entirely on the drive and the usage patterns. It probably won't be significant, but I'd bet that it will be noticeable.

albo wrote: I'm not sure if windows allows you to have different spin-down settings for the different drives - probably not. So in addition to figuring out what the impact on my battery life will be, I'm wondering if there are any other battery-saving settings I might use to minimize that impact.

I can't say for sure as I don't use Windows, but I can't imagine why it wouldn't. There's certainly no hardware limitation that would prevent this. Unlike previous generations, the T4x0 bays adapters are "passive": they simply connect the SATA port on the drive to the one on the board, so it's just another SATA drive on the bus. (The T4x and T6x used SATA->PATA bridge chips in their bay caddies which could screw with power management.) My bet is that if your OS can see it, it can manage power savings for it. All the normal ATA commands should work just fine.

albo wrote:Hi Folks,

I just got a cheap drive adapter for my cd bay in my T410 - awesome! These things only cost around $11 on ebay, and it seems to work wonderfully. I have a 7200rpm 500GB drive in there right now.

Indeed they are awesome. I got mine for about the same price on ebay.

albo wrote:Now I'm wondering what the hit on my battery life is likely to be. Any ideas?

It depends on the drive and the activity. On Lenovo Power Manager, you can see the current wattage your computer is using. You could take the number of watts used while the drive is inserted and then subtract the number of watts used when the drive is ejected. It will not be exact, but will give you a good idea.

albo wrote:I'm not sure if windows allows you to have different spin-down settings for the different drives - probably not. So in addition to figuring out what the impact on my battery life will be, I'm wondering if there are any other battery-saving settings I might use to minimize that impact.

thanks!

Why would you need separate spin down settings? If a drive isn't being used, it spins it down. Who cares which one it is? My 7200rpm drive only kicks on when I write or read to that drive, otherwise it stays powered off. I can feel it start up as the whole machine starts to lightly vibrate.

In the system tray you can use the remove device icon to power down the drive by ejecting it when not in use. You will have to disconnect/reconnect the ultrabay caddy when you want to power the drive back up though.