Advanced Dock Questions

[DigitalFoundry]

Hi there,

I've a few questions for owners of the T60/T61 advanced dock and hope that the enlightened forum members can help me out.

1. Extra hard disk - how is the hard disk connected. SATA or USB? SATA would make sense in terms of extra speed, and most laptops these days use SATA for both hard disks and optical drives, but I'd be very curious to know how the Advanced Dock does it. Also, I'm guessing there's only room for 2.5" hard disks? No chance of bunging a 750GB 3.5" in there?

2. Internal PCIe slot - aside from graphics cards, what kind of hardware has been successfully run in this slot? Any one?

3. Expandability - is there any other kind of expandability *within* the dock?

As you can most likely tell, I've seen plenty of pictures of the externals, but have little knowledge of what's inside or what the potential for the dock is.

[RonS]

1. The slim bay takes either SATA or PATA. There's room internally (via a drive caddy) for a 2.5" drive, but someone on this board used an extender cable to run a 3.5" drive outside their Thinkpad. I'll bet it would work in the dock as well.

2. I've run firewire and SCSI in the PCI-Express expansion bay.

3. I've run a video card physically outside the dock with a PCI-Express extender cable. I think that the previous dock, the Dock II for the T4x and other earlier Thinkpads, was more expandable because it had PCMCIA slots, which the Advanced Dock doesn't.

[DigitalFoundry]

Thanks! Do you think that there's any chance the dock could be modified internally to take a 3.5" SATA drive?

I'm looking to integrate a small PCIe card and an extra hard disk, and 2.5" doesn't really cut it either in terms of speed or capacity.

[RonS]

Nope - I can see no way to modify the Advanced Dock to take a 3.5" drive internally. Even if there was, I don't think it would be a good idea since the bandwidth between the Thinkpad and the dock appears to be limited to around 34 MB/sec.

You're better off getting a USB, Firewire or Expresscard interface for your 3.5" drive, and attaching it to the main unit.