SATA Drive Upgrade For T4x series?

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seefree · #1 Post by **seefree** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 11:35 am

Going to buy a T4x series Thinkpad this week, and one of the issues I am considering is buying one of the new Hitachi 100GB 7200 RPM hard drives to upgrade with. Some of these come in SATA. Are any current thinkpads compatabile with SATA? Thanks!

kaiser · #2 Post by **kaiser** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 12:05 pm

T43 got internally SATA but the HDD-Slot is bridged to IDE. The only ThinkPad with native SATA-HDD-Interface would be Z-Series, i think.

christopher_wolf · #3 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Thu Nov 24, 2005 1:17 pm

There have been successes concerning HDD replacements in T43s with non-IBM Branded Drives; there is a list of drives that work in the Thread here. The 2010 Hurdle is the biggest obstacle, but as Kaiser said...The T43 has a PATA-SATA Bridge and the Z Series is SATA.

amensi · #4 Post by **amensi** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 8:34 am

I wondered if replacing the drive would cause the shock protection not to function properly ?? Is there any known requirements for it to work or it just cut the power to it like in a hot swapable architecture.

DIGITALgimpus · #5 Post by **DIGITALgimpus** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 10:23 am

it doesn't cause any problems with shock protection. That works with any drive.

Thinkerer · #6 Post by **Thinkerer** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 4:10 am

DIGITALgimpus wrote:it doesn't cause any problems with shock protection. That works with any drive.

How can you be sure? The shock protection uses a special ATA command introduced by IBM to unload the disk heads, and other drives (or even other firmware) may not support that command.

DIGITALgimpus · #7 Post by **DIGITALgimpus** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 10:02 am

I'd love to know where the "special" comes from. Several people here report using other drives with APS enabled laptops with no problem.

Parking the HD isn't a special command. It's pretty standard. What's interesting with the feature is using a motion detector to decide when to do it.

Thinkerer · #8 Post by **Thinkerer** » Tue Nov 29, 2005 10:11 am

DIGITALgimpus wrote:I'd love to know where the "special" comes from. Several people here report using other drives with APS enabled laptops with no problem.

Sorry, I can't recall the ref, but I remember reading about IBM introducing some ATA command for the kind of head parking they needed. Maybe by now other manufacturers support it as well, which would be very good, but how can you be sure their head parking latency is low enough to be of use for HDAPS? According to IBM's HDAPS paper, the timing from start of movement to hitting the floor is extremely tight.

SATA Drive Upgrade For T4x series?

SATA Drive Upgrade For T4x series?

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