ultrabay for 2nd HDD info needed

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feathertop · #1 Post by **feathertop** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 9:40 pm

I'm trying to buy a T42, and the installed 40G is too small, need to get a second disk, can anyone tell me what equipment I need to buy to have both HDDs installed together?

Thanks in advance!

Cneil · #2 Post by **Cneil** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 10:05 pm

You'll need an ultrabay slim and a notebook hard drive of your choice.

#3 Post by **RonS** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 12:33 am

On a related note, I benchmarked a second hard drive mounted in both the TP's ultrabay slim and the ultrabay on the Dock II. They performed identically with the primary hard drive.

You also don't need to jumper the second drive as slave. It's recognized as a second drive automatically.

CantabRich · #4 Post by **CantabRich** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 2:06 am

Ron S: I saw your reply only after I posted my queries re T42/43 ultrabay speed. Could you please clarify: when you performed your benchmark, you noted no difference between the ultrabay slim speed and the dock II speed; did you also benchmark against the internal drive originally supplied with the device? As in, was there any difference in write/access speed between the first spindle drive (the orginal HDD) and the second HDD (iinstalled in either the ultrabay or the dock)?

#5 Post by **RonS** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 2:27 am

Correct. Testing on a T42p with two 7K60 hard drives using HDTach.

2nd hard drive mounted in Ultrabay slim, drives performed identically.
2nd hard drive mounted in Dock II's ultrabay, drives performed identically.

CantabRich · #6 Post by **CantabRich** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 2:35 am

RonS: thanks! Your post suggests that I could use:

1. a 5400 rpm drive as my primary drive, for OS, work files etc, and thereby use a quiet drive for work matter both at home and wihile travelliing; and

2. use a 7200 rpm drive for large files (e.g. videos, music) and back-ups when I am at home.

Or even vice versa. The extra cost for the 7200 rpm HDD is still justified, since I will be able to access that drive at its potential, even though it is installed in the ultrabay slim slot. Correct?

#7 Post by **RonS** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 2:50 am

Another slightly related note: I develop applications that demand large quantites of data. The best performing drive I've tested so far is a 1TB LaCie D2 Extreme drive on a PCMCIA firewire800 card. This configuration gives a real-world sustained rate of 64MB/sec. Installing a PCI firewire card in the Dock II, I can sustain 70 MB/sec. The firewire 800 interface is (apparently) the bottleneck in this configuration, since the drive performance the same across a wide range of data sizes.

The 7K60 drive sustains between 40MB/sec and 25MB/sec, depending on the data size. The 7K60 drive is the bottleneck in the T42p, not the ATA interface.

The 7K60 has a higher burst rate than the firewire drive, but, based on my experience, a high burst rate doesn't translate into better real-world performance.

I also put an Adaptec SCSI 29160 card in the Dock II to test with some 8mm tape drives (worked successfully at 25MB/sec), but I don't have any high-speed SCSI drives to test the full speed of this interface. I don't think that the SCSI160 can do better than the firewire 800, despite SCSI's performance claims.

I've also been doing lots of performance testing of video cards in the Dock II. I've have 12 flat-panel monitors running on this little Thinkpad, with the possibility of 16. One of these days I may write up some performance benchmark notes on various T42p peripherals and post them on this forum.

#8 Post by **RonS** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 2:53 am

CantabRich wrote:The extra cost for the 7200 rpm HDD is still justified, since I will be able to access that drive at its potential, even though it is installed in the ultrabay slim slot. Correct?

I suggest you use the 7200rpm drive (I assume it's the 7K60) as your primary drive, and use the slower drive as your backup/media file drive. Your system will perform better with the 7K60 as your primary drive. It doesn't matter where the drives are installed (primary, UB slim, or Dock) - moving a drive between these three locations will not change its performance.

The 7K60 is the best performing notebook drive available right now.

CantabRich · #9 Post by **CantabRich** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 2:57 am

Excellent stuff: thank you. Your explanation re the drive limitation (as opposed to the ATA bandwith limitations) might explain why IBM has not bothered to utilise the SATA interface in the Alviso/Sonoma platform T43 model.

It looks as if the most efficient form of back-up medium will be an external HDD atached via a fiewire 800 IDE card on the Dock II. Thanks again!

#10 Post by **RonS** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 3:02 am

CantabRich wrote: It looks as if the most efficient form of back-up medium will be an external HDD atached via a fiewire 800 IDE card on the Dock II. Thanks again!

If it's just for backups, I wouldn't bother with the Firewire stuff. I would just put the 5400 drive in one of the ultrabays and be done with it. Or even perhaps put the 5400 drive in an external USB2 enclosure. You don't need blinding performance for backups or audio files.

The Firewire becomes worthwhile when you need the fastest possible access to large quantities of data. Video editing, massive data files, etc.

ultrabay for 2nd HDD info needed

ultrabay for 2nd HDD info needed

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