T60 - Hard Drive performance

[wayneforrest]

I replaced my hard drive with a 7200 Seagate drive (ST9160823AS),
I noticed my drive was not performing well, and found some tips that I have applied, but I
am unsure if all is what it is supposed to be.

Here is what I did, I removed the drive and removed the jumper, according to some
post this puts the drive in SATA II mode, yet the T60 does not support SATA II,
but then again I managed to boot and the drive seems to work.

Should I leave the jumper off ? or does this mean my T60 does not supports SATA II
(8744HDG)


Then In my BIOS I set the DRIVE to Compatibility mode ,
since this will turn off NCQ (Native command queueing), this seemed to make my OS
more responsive, whenever there was disk activity on the T60 (AHCI MODE), I could do nothing but I had to wait for the disk activity to complete (serialized).
(Some post mentioned that IBM removes the NCQ on the IBM drives, and a method to remove NCQ
on NON IBM drives are to set the BIOS to compatibility mode).


I am not convinced yet that my DRIVE is optimal as is should be, I did some tests with
HD Tune, and the results were pretty much the same:

AHCI on:
Min: 27.9 MB/s
Max: 56.9 MB/s
Avg: 44.8 MB/s
Access Time: 14.6 ms
Burst Rate: 53.2 MB/s
CPU Usage: 14.5%

Compatible Mode
Min: 29.7 MB/s
Max: 57.0 MB/s
Avg: 45.2 MB/s
Access Time: 14.7 ms
Burst Rate: 89.1 MB/s
CPU Usage: 3.3%


I am also wondering what Client Security Solution has an impact on the DISK performance,
I am not sure how the Client Security Solution Disk encryption works.

Please post some Thoughts comments.

thank you.

Running VISTA not XP.

[RonS]

I've benchmarked hard drives in my T60p both with and without the SATA jumper set, and with and without Compatibility mode set in the BIOS. I've never been able to detect a performance difference no matter what I do.

The numbers you're seeing appears to be about correct for your drive. Check out this benchmark I found on another forum.

[wayneforrest]

Thank you Rons,

I am definitely leaving my drive in computability mode, as my system does feel more responsive
(Native Command Queueing being bypassed)

[Gustavo]

That is nice to know as I am soon to upgrade my harddrive in my new T60. If only it supported SATAII
then I would upgrade to SSD , but then again I can get a bigger drive for less money going after normal SATA drives.

Lenovo really did a bad job optimizing the T60, bad fan/heatsink being the main concern and SATAII missing being the other.

[diaz1023]

Thank you Rons,

I am definitely leaving my drive in computability mode, as my system does feel more responsive
(Native Command Queueing being bypassed)

Have you noticed an BSOD when you come out of a hibernation while the drive is in compatibility mode? I recently installed a 500gb seagate drive and set the drive as compatibility mode and got a BSOD when coming out of Hibernation. I set the drive back to AHCI and no BSOD. I would love to keep it in compatibilty mode for more response, but don't want to deal with BSOD if not needed.

[wayneforrest]

I do not have that problem in compatibility mode; although I have only suspend to ram once
since my last format of the hard drive that was done recently.

I have also looked at updating the drive firmware with lenovo's firmware, but I am not sure
if that will "kill" my drive,so I am not considering this at the moment; maybe someone else can confirm that it is safe to update the firmware of a drive that is a NON-IBM drive. This can probably be a fix for your problem with the BSOD, but I am guessing.

[diaz1023]

one thing that i read on another post is that i might need to turn off the turbo memory, which i did not do before using compatability mode. I will try that and post my results.

[fledster]

I recently upgraded my stock 100GB Hitachi 5400 rpm to the Hitachi Travelstar 7K320 and here are my results.
The new drive is running in "Compatible" mode. Booting / running programs is literally night and day compared to the old drive. Very happy with the upgrade. (Recently came with the $20 Rebate)

Before:




After:

[Marin85]

How interesting, the 7K320 has better access time than the 7200.3 (installed in my ThinkPad)... And it was supposed to be the other way around...