t60 upgradeable hard drive?

[codek]

Does the t60 use a regular 2.5 notbook hard drive? Can I put any 2.5 in there?

[christopher_wolf]

Does the t60 use a regular 2.5 notbook hard drive? Can I put any 2.5 in there?

Any 2.5" as long as it is SATA.

[kulivontot]

What about the motion sensors and things like that? I know Lenovo uses a special firmware on their drives to support the anti-shock thing. Is this sensor external to the drive and will work without the firmware?

[christopher_wolf]

What about the motion sensors and things like that? I know Lenovo uses a special firmware on their drives to support the anti-shock thing. Is this sensor external to the drive and will work without the firmware?

Errr, no...No extra firmware is needed for the HDAPS nor any specialized hardware on the HDD itself.

The HDAPS system is a 3D MEMs accelerometer on the motherboard itself, when it determines that a shock is imminent, it will ramp the heads off the platters of the HDD and park them. All modern HDDs support this. All the HDAPS system does is send a signal to the drive to ramp the heads, it doesn't require extra hardware or software on the drive. Just as if the HDD was being spun down or going into a deep sleep state, the heads get parked. That's all the HDD needs to be capable of doing.

From a engineering/design standpoint; if it can do the same thing with a signal from the HDAPS unit with a normal HDD which responds to a standard "park the heads" signal, why require a HDD with special firmware/software to do the same thing at extra cost?

[astro]

Errr, no...No extra firmware is needed for the HDAPS nor any specialized hardware on the HDD itself.

Hey Chris, do you know if you HAVE to run tpshocks.exe for HDAPS to work? You would think they would have it set up in BIOS. Maybe the only thing that tpshocks does is let you configure the sensitivity?

[christopher_wolf]

Errr, no...No extra firmware is needed for the HDAPS nor any specialized hardware on the HDD itself.

Hey Chris, do you know if you HAVE to run tpshocks.exe for HDAPS to work? You would think they would have it set up in BIOS. Maybe the only thing that tpshocks does is let you configure the sensitivity?

Not quite sure of that, there aren't too many white papers that outline its use; although most of the functions rely on an API of sorts that talks to the sensors via the EC. I would lean towards the tpshocks.exe being more than just a pretty front-end to it as it does need some fairly advanced options like sensitivity to be set by the user. Rudimentary function might be there, as I noticed it was parking both HDDs in Linux before I had patched it with the HDAPS driver, which suggests that they might be a BIOS basis for it. I haven't, however, seen anything in the BIOS that would give the user options about it.

Let me try something to get a good look at the internals of the tpshocks.exe program, see what I can find, then either post back or edit this post.

1ST EDIT: Well, it has a Windows Pre-fetch Identifier/Reference, so right now I am guessing that it is required and loaded a la a driver/software API fronted.

[christopher_wolf]

Wow, well...this would have been another edit, but there is alot.

I took the liberty of disassembling it and using a hex editor then SoftICE to check the driver/software calls. First off, I can say that this is a very well done piece of software; *everything* in the view I could see was very well organized and there were very few un-necessary jumps. Also, the code has been very well thought out; looking at the reference calls and functions, it appears as if they tried to think of every contingency. For example, if you have a fullscreen application going, it will not start the proc call to show a little window ballon, interrupting your fullscreen application. They actually took the time to code this into a function set *within* the program itself. Unlike other tray icons that pop up window ballons when they feel like it that can seriously intrude upon a full screen app.

Next up, I found the DLL set it calls; it only loads the ones it needs at the beginning. It will also attempt several reloads if the loading of the *.dll fails at first. They are all pretty standard fair for what you would expect, KERNEL32.DLL, ADVAPI32.DLL, USER32.DLL, etc. Here is where it gets interesting, it also loads its own set of *.dlls for its function and seems not to have to indirectly access the hardware. It appears to use these primarily as you would use a driver, although you can consider it half-driver half-software....Theoretically, you could end up using the DLL set it loads as a little API.

So it is pretty much required for head parking and the BIOS knows little, if anything, about the communication going on between the accelerometer chipset and the HDD. On a system without it, the HDD shouldn't be sensitive to the motion of the system even though the accelerometers are outputting data. I don't see a way for that data to get to the HDD in the form of a standard "park the heads" signal other than through the HDAPS system on-board with the driver and software working as a unit. I doubt that there is a dedicated hardware interconnect between the accelerometer chipset and the HDD, even through the BIOS, for this (but the EC is involved, just have to figure out what registers it is dumping the data too ).

Further, I can say that, whatever team at IBM/Lenovo made this, did a [censored] good job at it and it shows, merely from the fine organization that I saw once I ran it through the dis-assembler and the well-explained/titled functions present and how they were called as well as the lack of un-explained unconditional jumps (a good sign of a coder just doing a kludge up dodgy job) and low-resource consumption. Alot of people must have done a hefty amount of quality R&D and good old fashioned elbow grease to get this thing into the excellent shape it is in.

I have a bit of free time so I think I will tinker around with it more and see what I can find with it; I will also look at the HDAPS project drivers for Linux and compare the two.

[DenTP4rm]

Hi Guys,
I realize this question isn't really on topic but, it's close. I'm into drive cloning and I'll need to remove the HD from my new T60p on an intermitant basis and replace it with a clone. I just removed the original HD and noticed that to get it out I had to pull on a little plastic tab. Anybody have any experience on how to remove a non-original HD? Do I need to remove this little tab from the original HD and stick it on any non-original drive I use I put in the main drive bay?

BTW, Costcentral has a pretty good price on the Hitachi 100GB Sata. You've got to be careful though, as their prices can change up or down 10-15% in a matter of hours.
Thanks in advance,
Den

[kulivontot]

So what does the special lenovo hdd firmware do then if it's not used for the APS function? Is there any benefit of having actual lenovo firmware?

[jhkaska]

Den, The plastic tab is not attached to the hard drive but is attached to the hard drive caddy. You need to remove the original hard drive from the caddy and put your second hard drive into the caddy before inserting it into the laptop.

[DenTP4rm]

Den, The plastic tab is not attached to the hard drive but is attached to the hard drive caddy. You need to remove the original hard drive from the caddy and put your second hard drive into the caddy before inserting it into the laptop.

Hey, Jhkaska
You're right. I hadn't seen that. Thanks for the tip. Would you know if, when you order a spare HD caddy it comes with the plastic tab?
Thanks again,
Den

[jhkaska]

Den, Not sure if new caddy comes with plastic tab but I assume it does. Also, not sure why you would want another caddy since you would probably need to remove it from the caddy anyway to insert it into a slim drive or any other device for cloning. But if you can figure out how to clone it while still in the caddy, I would be interested in hearing how you do it.

[DenTP4rm]

Den, Not sure if new caddy comes with plastic tab but I assume it does. Also, not sure why you would want another caddy since you would probably need to remove it from the caddy anyway to insert it into a slim drive or any other device for cloning. But if you can figure out how to clone it while still in the caddy, I would be interested in hearing how you do it.

Hey, Jhkaska,
Good point. First, I was thinking of just having one with the spare clone in it ready to go. But, I also ran across a kind of cable connection that dispenses with the slim drive housing. It looks like it's for regular SATA connections but I assume it would also work with a 2.5 SATA.

Do you know if the connections and power standards are the same, i.e., can I take a 2.5 SATA and connect it to a standard SATA power and data connectors in a desktop and have it work? If so, you could use this cable setup to clone without the slim drive housing. You can see the cable at:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000E6 ... e&n=172282
Let me know what you think,
Den

[astro]

Wow, well...this would have been another edit, but there is alot.

Wow, thanks for the info, Chris!

I agree, TPShocks is one of the tiniest TSR (a DOS term!) programs running on my system -- 336/640K Mem/VM, which is incredibly small considering that most of that is probably the little taskbar icon stuff. I'm more than happy for it to stay there and keep doin it's thing!

[jhkaska]

Den, I'm not familiar with the one from Amazon but it looks to me like it would work. I have one similar to it, but not SATA, that I use with my old Dell but it will not connect while the drive is in the caddy because of the unique connector that Dell uses. So it is always an extra chore to be taking the drive out of the caddy to do a clone and switch drives. So if this does work with the drive in the caddy, it will really simplify things. It states that it will work with both a two and a half and three and a half inch drive so you should be covered. If you do try it, let us know how it works.