[ltp] Thinkpad z60m second hard drive

[Theodore Tso]

On Sun, Jul 30, 2006 at 06:37:31AM -0700, henningj wrote:
> 
> I recently added the ThinkPad Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter (40Y8725)
> with a 80GB SATA disk to my z60m. As soon as I access the disk to either
> copy a file to/from it etc. my system starts to respond very slowly. I
> previously had a T41 also with a second hard disk and did not experience
> this problem at all.
> 
> I experience this problem on RHEL 4.0 as well as CentOS 4.3.

In the BIOS settings, try disabling AHCI mode in the SATA
configuration section and enabling legacy mode.  Then, make sure that
you have the ata_piix driver compiled into a reasonably recent
kernel(*), and make sure you have hdc=noprobe in your boot line so
that the IDE driver doesn't grab the second hard drive, so it is
available for the ata_piix driver to grab.

With this configuration, hdparm -tT shows a transfer rate of 50 MBps,
instead of 15 Mbps if using the IDE compatibility interface.  

(*) I don't know if RHEL4 has a new enough kernel for this to work; I
doubt it, though....

						- Ted