Thinkpads Forum

Does anyone know if the hard drives of 320 GB and 500 GB available for the W520 on the lenovo's site are SATA 3 (6 Gb/s) drives ?

I have the Hitachi 500 GB 7200 rpm.

I do not believe that it is SATA III.

I have however replaced it with a C300 that is.

I suppose that a SATA III HDD would work since I think our Ultrabay Caddy will support that speed but the as delivered HDD is pretty much going to be replaced in most or at least many cases.

Perry

As far as I know no SATA III drives have been certified with Lenovo systems.

They are said to be appearing later this year (September?), though.

Actually, I haven't seen any SATA III 2.5" drives anywhere, for that matter.

Lenovo uses multiple suppliers for hard drives. Whether it's SATA I or III is probably irrelevant. No platter based drives can hit SATA II speeds.

You can find here a list of SATA III 6Gb/s bare drives for laptops:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... 06.0Gb%2fs

exactly what FredGarvin said. Since 2.5" drives are at best around 130 MB/s it is completely irrelevant question.

commander wrote:exactly what FredGarvin said. Since 2.5" drives are at best around 130 MB/s it is completely irrelevant question.

You seem to completely ignore something completely obvious: There is no question completely or absolutely irrelevant! By cons, it is certain that there are many people who completely lack tact! Take a look at the contents of the list available via the provided link and you will see plenty of 2"5-6 Gb/s platter based drives...

Unfortunately those 2.5" SATA 3 drives are server drives and not designed for laptops.

I was fooled too until I read more of the specs.

Brad

It's true, that a lot of HDD manufacturers are cheerfully announcing their "Killer speed" SATA III / 6Gb/s drives.

The point Commander and FredGavin have been trying to make is that even these drives can't come close to sustaining that transfer rate. WD's VelociRaptor Spec Sheet (PDF) shows a "Host to/from drive (sustained)" performance of 145MB/s. This is just barely able to squeak past the interface speed offered by SATA rev 1.

It's a little bit like worrying whether you should get speakers that can handle 120W or just 90W when all your amplifier puts out is 50W. (Speakers ~=~ SATA interface; amp ~=~ platters.) It really doesn't matter how much power your speakers can handle so long as it's more than your amp puts out (ignoring clipping; limit of simile reached). Similarly, it really doesn't matter for a general-purpose workstation how fast the transfer rate is so long as it is faster than your mechanism. (But it does make a lovely bullet point on marketing materials.)

As Brad mentioned, these are server drives. (The WD ones are about twice as thick as notebook drives, for example.) Quite possibly there are server applications (maybe a database server?) where there would be a small amount of data accessed so frequently that it would stay in the buffer and you'd actually benefit from that interface speed. But posing such a scenario for a W520 seems far-fetched.

Hope this rounds out the response to your valid question/curiosity and help you understand what they mean by "irrelevant."

davidhbrown wrote:Hope this rounds out the response to your valid question/curiosity and help you understand what they mean by "irrelevant."

Yes, it does! Thank you guys for allowing us to make the right choices by generously making us enjoy of your deep knowledge of the subject and of your precious time!