Thinkpad T61 Deadly Slow PCMCIA Performance Issue(Pic)

[trungnk]

Hi everyone,

I have just bought a Thinkpad T61 7665 series with 1 Card Reader and 1 PCMCIA slot.

I've been using an Express Card to eSATA adapter for long with my previous T60 with blazing fast speed (> 70MB / s comparing with only 20MB/s USB 2.0) for data backup without any problem.

Since this new Thinkpad T61 does not have an Express Card slot, I have to buy a PCMCIA to eSATA adapter card instead, and now I face this annoying problem: The transfer speed is deadly slow, and limited to only 10MB/s. With this same card, I plug into the Dell Latitude D630's PCMCIA slot and the speed is just as expected (at least 60MB/s). That means the problem comes from the Thinkpad T61 itself.

I tried on both Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista (with and without SP1) an no luck for me. For both OS, the same driver for the PCMCIA slot is used, and it's provided by default from MS, which is Ricoh R/RL/5C476(II) or Compatible Cardbus Controller. Unfortunately there's no such similar PCMCIA driver provided by Lenovo themself for the T61 / T61p series.

I've been hopelessly googling around for a few continuously, and this seems to be a common issue with Thinkpad users, such as this thread from the official Lenovo forums:

http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/mess ... ing&page=2

The problem is the same with every Thinkpad T61 that has PCMCIA slot. You will only realize it only when you actually use it. Carl, a hardware engineer has just put up this excellent article named "Lenovo Thinkpad T61 Slow PCMCIA Performance" covering the whole issue with detailed benchmark to prove the truth. Please do take a look:

http://2xod.com/articles/Lenovo%20T61%20Slow%20PCMCIA/

I borrow his benchmark graph and put here for easy understanding:



Anyone here having the same problem or already got a solution please help us!

MOD EDIT: Picture warning added.

[hyperq]

T61 Widescreen and R61 Widescreen are sharing so many parts. Could they be sharing the same motherboard too? Maybe they decided to put a low cost R61 motherboard in a T61 body, so they can charge more money just because it is a "T" model.

[JMUT]

This is a real problem for me too.

My company recently purchased several T61's (I got one) and they all have this problem. We tried going through tech support but that proved completely useless. Now we're going through our sales rep at Lenovo who hopefully can get an engineer to reproduce the problem and possibly get us a fix.

My blazing fast eSata drive has been demoted to a slow poke USB2 connection (which is considerably faster than this crippled cardbus slot). I was running virtual machines off an external 500GB drive but it's so slow now that I have moved the machines to the internal drive.

I'll keep you posted on any updates we get from our Sales rep.

- Jeff in SLC Utah

[JMUT]

Here are few benchmarks to illustrate the problem.







PS - the eSata card I'm using can be found here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6839233002

[Troels]

This should seriously be noted on the product pages of the T6x series. I also receive similar figures (~14.5 MB/s), but it is with an USB 2.0 PCMCIA card on a T60p with a Texas Instruments PCI1510 controller.
I do not have an eSATA PC card, but judging from the fact that the USB bus is not loaded by other devices, the results ought to be around 30 MB/s read instead due to the USB being a bad standard in comparison to Firewire.

[2xod.com]

I created that first article, and I've created another that will hopefully shed some light on this issue.

It looks like it's the Ricoh controller that is the cause of the extremely low cardbus performance. The Dell X300 uses a similar chip and suffers from similarly poor performance.

http://2xod.com/articles/eSATA%20Perfor ... ntrollers/

[NathanA]

Wow! Ugh. That's bad! However, if the problem is with the Ricoh controller, the T60s with the Texas Instruments chip shouldn't be suffering from the same issue, as Troels thinks he is seeing on his T60.

I have a T60p with a Texas Instruments chip and a CardBus firewire card and access to an external firewire drive. I will find some time to hook this all up and run HDtune on this set-up to see if I also have trouble getting past 15Mbit/s.

I'll report back here once I'm through testing.

-- Nathan

[2xod.com]

I tested another laptop that I didn't put in there because I didn't have enough info... but it was capped at 3.6 MB/sec.

The performance is all over the map. It seems to be a general lack of following the cardbus standard.

If anyone can find models of other sata to pci bridges that have been put in pcmcia / cardbus cards I'll get it and add it to these results. It seems like the great majority of all the esata / sata cardbus cards use these 3 chips.

[NathanA]

Okay, so I tested a firewire drive with my IBM FireWire CardBus card with HD Tach on a T60p with Texas Instruments CardBus controller chip, and saw very consistent results: 32MB/s sequential read (a virtual flat line), and 33.9MB/s burst read. Every single time I ran the test, these were the numbers I got.

I was expecting slightly better performance from FireWire as this is not quite achieving 400Mbit/s. I understand some overhead must exist, but I wasn't expecting to see only 66% of maximum theoretical FireWire bandwidth. I don't know whether this is due to the CardBus controller, the hard drive (doubtful given the flat line in the sequential read test), or my specific FireWire card. I WAS running on battery at the time, but had the Lenovo Power Manager set to Maximum Performance, so I doubt that's it.

Still, it's not as bad as the performance problem that 2xod.com is seeing with his eSATA CardBus card. What I find interesting, though, is that I did a search for this issue and found this thread on NotebookReview.com, in which 2xod is also a participant:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=231889

One person, scoot1212, claims 40MB/s through a FireWire card on both a T60 and a T61, and confirmed that the T61 he used also had a Ricoh CardBus controller.

Why would one FireWire card give a 40MB/s result, but three different SATA chips in three different CardBus cards give the same poor result on the same computer? That just doesn't make sense. Wouldn't we expect to see the throughput problem affect FireWire and eSATA equally?

Anybody have a USB CardBus card with a USB external HDD to test in a T61? It'd be interesting to see if hooking up an HDD via USB through CardBus also beats the eSATA rates on the same laptop.

-- Nathan

[2xod.com]

I need to update the article beacuse I'm fairly certain the Ricoh RC5847 controller is responsible for the Cardbus, Firewire, and Memory Card (SD/ XD / Memory Stick) functions.

So perhaps it's not the Ricoh controller itself rather than the method the Ricoh chip uses to connect to the chipset.

http://www.ricoh.com/LSI/product_pcif/p ... index.html

[JMUT]

UPDATE - This issue appears to have been resolved with the bios update released on 6/11/2008 (version 2.19-1.08)

Speeds have gone from an average of 14 MB/s to about 60MB/s. This is close to the maximum I've seen on my tests with other laptops.

Thank you Lenovo!

PS - the bios update for the T61 can be found here:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-67988

[jimmy274]

T61 Widescreen and R61 Widescreen are sharing so many parts. Could they be sharing the same motherboard too? Maybe they decided to put a low cost R61 motherboard in a T61 body, so they can charge more money just because it is a "T" model.

Hmm, well, they've been sharing motherboards ever since the first R series, just so you know...

[mixz1]

It appears as though Lenovo has resolved the problem with a BIOS update which can be found at http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-67988

Good luck!

[NathanA]

Great to hear!! Thanks for the heads-up!

-- Nathan

[icantux]

There's a similar update for the X61 that addresses the firewire and cardbus speed issues...

BIOS update v.2.14 (for X61(s) ONLY ):
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-67982

[imbaray]

I'm still suffering from this issue, using a pcmcia-esata adaptor and i'm using the latest bios.
I've a T61 7661-Z3W, anyone suffering from the same?

Thanks in advance,
-- Rui

[loyukfai]

Sorry for bringing up an old thread. I'm considering to get an eSATA PCMCIA controller for an X61T, and would like to know if this issue has really been resolved.

BTW, is there any eSATA PCMCIA controller out there with powered eSATA ports which can utilize something like this?

Cheers.