Thinkpads Forum

I just ordered a T410.

Now I'm thinking about options... Like I can replace the CD drive (which I don't particularly need) with a battery. Or maybe a second HDD?

Apparently I can use the "ThinkPad Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter III 43N3412" to add a second HDD.

Now, my question is, does the controller support RAID0?

Thanks!

At least you can use RAID0 on a software level, even if the controller does not support it.
However, what is the point in using such a raid? In such a case, death of one HDD will result in loss of all data; you will be unable to temporarily replace that extra HDD with optical drive/extra battery/weight saver; you will experience higher power consumption (as both HDDs will need to run simultaneously) and lower battery life... And all advantages you will receive are: higher HDD performance (if it concerns you so much, why don't you upgrade to SSD instead?) and higher capacity (which could be solved by using two separate HDDs without any RAID).

SDD... well, yeah, sure, a 500GB one would be nice. But that baby would cost me more than the laptop itself. I could go with a 160GB SSD for speed and a 500GB HD in the ultrabay for extra capacity (which I do need)... and I will still have the problem of high power consumption + no possibility of using the ultrabay battery.

In the meantime RAID0 with two 500GB HDs would be a relatively cheap way to get extra performance. Certainly cheaper than SDD and I'd have 1TB of capacity to boot. It has worked fine for me on my desktop computer. Sure the chance of failure is twofold compared to a single HD - and that's why we do backups.

Anyway... I just found a post by "Navck" from some months ago, said the T410 will do RAID.

vkostic wrote:SDD... well, yeah, sure, a 500GB one would be nice. But that baby would cost me more than the laptop itself. I could go with a 160GB SSD for speed and a 500GB HD in the ultrabay for extra capacity (which I do need)... and I will still have the problem of high power consumption + no possibility of using the ultrabay battery.

I cannot believe you have 500GB of vital important data. As long as you store files that you need right now on SSD, you will have low power consumption + possibility of using the ultrabay battery.
IMHO such a hybrid solution is the best: performance when you need it, capacity when you need it, low power consumption when you need etc.

I greatly appreciate you divining my storage needs. I'm in awe at how you did it without ever looking at what's on my hard drive now and what needs to be there in the future. Brilliant. But that was not the question.

The question was, can you do hardware RAID0 with a second drive in the Ultrabay?

Not sure if this will be the remedy you're looking for, but it's a potential one:

You can boost read performance using eBoostr and an SD-card. Think of it as a do-it-yourself hybrid solid-state/platter drive with the ability to enlarge the SD cache by simply buying a larger SD card. You can even use RAM as a read-cache; a RAM cache would have about 3GB/s random read speeds, much faster than any SSD on the market.

Unfortunately, it doesn't directly increase write performance. It does free up the HDD during writes more because it can pull certain files from cache, leading to some, but not very much increase in write performance.

vkostic wrote:The question was, can you do hardware RAID0 with a second drive in the Ultrabay?

yes, but only with software.   hardware RAID (which is still fake RAID) is only supported on certain W510 and all W70x models.