Thinkpads Forum

I have a T60 that destroyed two drivebay batteries back when it was new, both within about a month. A lot of people had that particular problem: it came down to a fundamental flaw in the way the batteries were managed. The drivebay was discharged to 0% before the machine would switch over to the primary, and wouldn't even start being recharged until the primary was at 100%. The drivebay battery got killed by the constant deep discharges.

So, has this been fixed? Three and a half years later, is it finally safe to buy a drivebay battery for a T400? What's the behaviour like these days?

It has not been "fixed" because it was not broken. The bay battery was never meant for constant use, rather as an extra boost when needed. I've used them in the T400, T60p and T42p before that and all behave the same.

syncrotic wrote:it came down to a fundamental flaw in the way the batteries were managed.

From my point of view, the fundamental flaw seems to me to be in the way you were using the battery.

asiafish wrote:The bay battery was never meant for constant use, rather as an extra boost when needed.

So the correct usage goes:

1) Discharge main battery to x%
2) Insert bay battery
3) ...
4) Recharge
5) Remove bay battery

How is this not completely broken? Am I missing something?

Well at least I have my answer: I won't waste any money on the secondary battery.

And yes, that behaviour is in fact broken; are you seriously apologizing for it with the "it's not a bug, it's a feature" argument? Let's just say for a second that the argument isn't completely insane... why should it have to be this way? Why can't it be better?

Before my T60, I had a Dell Latitude D610. It discharged the drivebay battery first, down to 10 or 20% (I forget which). Then it switched to the main battery, discharging that to 10%. Then it switched back to the drivebay battery, so you only deep-discharged it when it was truly necessary.

When charging, it used similar logic: recognizing that the last 20% of a charge takes almost as long as the first 80%, it charged the primary to 80%, then the drivebay battery to 80%, then topped up the primary, then topped up the secondary. Back when my thinkpad's drivebay battery still held a charge, I remember sitting at an airport trying to suck as much power up as possible before a flight, and having to remove the main battery so the secondary would get some juice... the machine would have happily sat there topping up the last 5Wh of the main battery instead of putting 30Wh into the secondary in the same amount of time.

syncrotic wrote:I had a Dell Latitude D610....

You're not in Kansas anymore. ThinkPad land, fortunately, isn't like Dell land.

[/quote]
So the correct usage goes:

1) Discharge main battery to x%
2) Insert bay battery
3) ...
4) Recharge
5) Remove bay battery

How is this not completely broken? Am I missing something?[/quote]

The correct usage is, bay battery stays home or at the office 99% of the time, and is only put into the laptop for long trips. If you want consistently long life, get a 9 cell instead.

bill bolton wrote: You're not in Kansas anymore. ThinkPad land, fortunately, isn't like Dell land.

I get that you're a fan of thinkpads; so am I. I've been using one for three and a half years after all, and my next machine will in all likelihood be a T400. But you're basically just dismissing my argument by saying that "that's how dell does it, and dell sucks, so that sucks." It's not sound logic.

I'm saying that there's a proven and better way to manage secondary batteries, one that Lenovo can't or won't implement. Having a battery that you can only use on special occasions makes no sense. That second battery should be an extension of the power available to the machine, every day.... because some of us do in fact need it. Isn't the whole idea of "all day computing" to keep me from having to hunt for power outlets in lecture halls, airports, airplanes, and conference rooms?

"Just use a nine-cell battery" is not an answer. That's 84Wh of energy. Why can't I have an extra 29Wh on top of that, every day? Because I don't need it? Says who?

My "usage pattern" is simple: I don't need a DVD, so I stick one of these batteries into the DVD slot. Whenever I need to take off from the office, I get enough battery life. As pointed out, this quickly kills the additional battery. So I agree: The implementation is broken, and could probably easily be fixed in the Thinkpad BIOS.
Maybe this is a simple oversight, an honest engineering mistake and no one ever told Lenovo about this?

Regards, Martin

asiafish wrote:The correct usage is, bay battery stays home or at the office 99% of the time, and is only put into the laptop for long trips.

Just like an optical drive, except the laptop doesn't treat that as a hostile object to be destroyed so you can keep it inside even when you don't need it.

Thinkwiki has a workaround (not tested on recent models):

Ultrabay eject lever

It seems that you don't have to completely remove the Ultrabay battery from the bay to stop using it. If you release the eject lever, but don't actually pull the battery from the bay, the battery is still visible to the system, but the BIOS reverses the order of use and will completely deplete the main battery before using the Ultrabay battery. While the BIOS can switch to the Ultrabay battery when the main battery runs out, it cannot switch fast enough when the main battery is pulled. Make sure you push the eject lever in before swapping the main battery or the system will lose power. Likewise, if you have the ultrabay lever pushed in: while the system can switch to the main battery when the ultrabay battery is empty, it cannot switch to the main battery fast enough if the ultrabay battery slips out of the bay without the lever being released- the system will lose power.

The order of charging is not affected by the state of the eject lever. Works on: T23, T40p. May or may not work on other models.

syncrotic wrote:I'm saying that there's a proven and better way to manage secondary batteries

No, you are saying there is a different way to manage them.

For many corporate business uses, the Dell way is definitely NOT better.

bill bolton wrote:No, you are saying there is a different way to manage them.

For many corporate business uses, the Dell way is definitely NOT better.

Would you kindly describe for me a single scenario in which the Lenovo approach is better than the Dell one? Not equivalent, but actually better.

tinue wrote:My "usage pattern" is simple: I don't need a DVD, so I stick one of these batteries into the DVD slot. Whenever I need to take off from the office, I get enough battery life. As pointed out, this quickly kills the additional battery. So I agree: The implementation is broken, and could probably easily be fixed in the Thinkpad BIOS.
Maybe this is a simple oversight, an honest engineering mistake and no one ever told Lenovo about this?

That's a good point: a lot of people almost never need optical drives these days. I could use more battery runtime every day, while I use an optical drive once a month. For many users, the best and most useful occupant of the drivebay is a second battery. Keeping it in there on a full-time basis shouldn't destroy it inside of a month.

syncrotic wrote:
That's a good point: a lot of people almost never need optical drives these days. I could use more battery runtime every day, while I use an optical drive once a month. For many users, the best and most useful occupant of the drivebay is a second battery. Keeping it in there on a full-time basis shouldn't destroy it inside of a month.

I agree, it's a great use of that space to install a second battery for those occasional times when one actually needs it. For those users that require longer run times daily the better choice is a 9 cell. If weight is an issue, simply remove the optical drive and install the plastic cover that Lenovo sells. I've done both & found it a great solution. Yet that said, I've also left the ultrabay battery in place for months on my T60 & not once have I "killed one" in a month. Yes I've used them up faster than a main battery but that's to be expected. In my experience there is no "perfect laptop". ThinkPads have _always_ served me better than any of the others, and believe me I've had & continue to sample many of the competitors.
.
Cheers...

I can't believe people are actually apologizing for this design flaw that could be easily fixed in software. I've gone through several drivebay batteries for exactly this same reason. I use mine with a 9 cell battery to get the maximum battery life possible. I use the cd drive not more than a couple of times per year, so the battery stays in my machine 99% of the time. I should not have to manually eject it when it reaches 10% or wait until the main battery is dead in the first place to put it in.

Lenovo must know about this, as it's a common complaint on any forum that deals with Thinkpads. Why they haven't fixed it I can't fathom.

I love my Thinkpads also, but the approach that Syncrotic mentioned his Dell was using seems ideal. It gives long usage time, minimizes deep discharges, and makes the best use of charge time... I initially bought a T42 drive bay battery but returned it after I noticed this oversight. It didn't just run the bay battery down, it ran it ALL THE WAY down before switching to the main battery. Frequent deep discharging is one of the quickest ways to kill LI-ON batteries. The other notable way being letting them get and stay too warm. The T42 also wasted time topping of the main when it could have mostly charged the bay battery.

Why not make the main and bay battery charging scheme a bios or os controllable option? At the very least make it switchable between the existing scheme and a more Dell-like scheme. I could forgive Lenovo for being a follower on this front

I took a chance with my T410s order and have ordered a bay battery. Sadly, if it manages the bay battery the same way as previous IBM/Lenovo's, it's gonna have to go back too. The alternative being me warranty returning them...

This is a very interesting discussion, I too have always had early failures with the bay batteries on T4x, T6x and even my T400s bay batt. is down 20% and it is only 4 months old. syncrotic, your comment that there is a design flaw is valid, obviously Dell for one reason or another took this problem into account and Lenovo did not.

I have sent a email to our outside tech rep. at Lenovo about this issue and suggested that Lenovo provide a BIOS or power manager update to "fix" this problem. We are kind of stuck since the only additional battery option for our standard NB (T400s) is so prone to failure.

Bill and asiafish, you must not support hundreds or (in my case) thousands of ThinkPad users. For you to think it is reasonable to explain this issue to end users as their "fault" is crazy. The battery fits in the Thinkpad as a permanent part and the hardware should treat it as so.

moore101: Thanks. It's always been my hope that someone with some influence is actually reading this forum... if you ever get an answer from your tech rep, please let us know.

We can argue all we want about this... but Lenovo chose to implement the "which battery first" in a specific way. Some people think that's the right way, some people think it's the wrong way. The key point here is that neither of these options is clearly, unequivocally better than the other... so...

Unless you can convince lenovo that a LARGE MAJORITY of people think the current way is broken, they have no motivation to fix it. I agree that a configuration option in the software would be a nice-to-have, but it seems like something that wouldn't rate much higher than "medium" on someone's priority list.

(As a total aside: linux systems allow you to modify this behavior, because someone with sufficient coding skillz wanted it bad enough ... proving once again that a lot of times if you want something done, you have to do it yourself...)

ljwobker wrote:(As a total aside: linux systems allow you to modify this behavior, because someone with sufficient coding skillz wanted it bad enough ... proving once again that a lot of times if you want something done, you have to do it yourself...)

Double

ljwobker wrote:We can argue all we want about this... but Lenovo chose to implement the "which battery first" in a specific way. Some people think that's the right way, some people think it's the wrong way. The key point here is that neither of these options is clearly, unequivocally better than the other... so...

Some people might think Lenovo's approach is right and some might think it's wrong, but nobody from that former group has managed to produce a sensible argument to justify their position.

I'm still waiting.

You're right though - Lenovo doesn't particularly seem to care

The fact that Lenovo's way causes the ultrabay battery to have a lifespan of less than 1 year is all the proof I need that there is something wrong. Heck, after 6 months the things have typically lost 30% or more of their capacity. It's perfectly well known that draining a li-ion battery to 0 reduces capacity. It happens like clockwork with the ultrabay batteries.

I'm looking for a utility that I can set low battery alarms for individual batteries. Then I can disable the Ultrabay battery when it gets to 10%. I cannot find one that does this. any thoughts?

Figured out a manual work around:

Set my low battery alarm to 60%. This corresponds to just over 10% left on the ultrabay w/ a full main battery. When this comes in I do a "safely remove" of the ultrabay drive. Then I run down the main battery. If I want the ultrabay again, I can have device manager find it again.

Its a manual routine but it works.

roberts5 wrote:Figured out a manual work around:

Set my low battery alarm to 60%. This corresponds to just over 10% left on the ultrabay w/ a full main battery. When this comes in I do a "safely remove" of the ultrabay drive. Then I run down the main battery. If I want the ultrabay again, I can have device manager find it again.

Its a manual routine but it works.

That's a great workaround. Here's hoping Lenovo finally fixes this broken functionality.

I used the bay-battery for almost 2 years on my X301 and no problems and the battery still reports to be in good condition and i loose like an hour at least when i remove it! so my advice just charge and don't worry!

For once I think I have to take Dell's side here, even though I'm not really a fan of them. I don't like having the 9-cell stick way out of the battery slot, as it doesn't fit into my backpack correctly that way. I noticed the quick loss of capacity, but I never realized that any company had a solution. Hopefully thinkpad owners who want it can have it soon.

Despite the elitistic approach of some Thinkpadders, Lenovo is certainly not the holy grail, and there are certain aspects which the other manufacturers clearly got down better. Even DELL, which sometimes is considered almost a swear word in these parts. The bay battery algorithm seems to be a good example.

Yeah, but thinkpad is the only laptop I would trust that can double as a really short step-stool (one of my favorite pro-thinkpad demos.)

I'm sure they'll get it if we complain enough!