[ltp] Upgrading hard drive on T61

[Jens Rutschmann]

Cherife Li wrote on 05.08.2009 19:48:
> On Wed, 05 Aug 2009 at 09:58:06 -0700, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> 
>> I could also use a little more room on the T61 hard drive. I am
>> thinking about upgrading it to a 7200 RPM drive of 250 GB or so. What I
>> am wondering is if the SATA-1 rating on the T61 is due to the
>> controller being only SATA-1, or is the controller really a SATA-2
>> controller and the limitation is that the disk is only SATA-1. If the
>> controller is really a SATA-2 controller I think I would get a
>> significant performance improvement with a fast SATA-2 disk.
> 
> ICH8M SATA Controller is SATA-2.
> It's said that Lenovo limited data transfer rate to 100MB/s on south
> bridge of 945 and 965 motherboards.

Can anyone confirm this? I was thinking about getting one of those OCZ Vertex 
solid state disks for my T61. While the limitation surely won't affect the 
speedup gained due to the faster access times, it would be sad to throttle the 
disk down to 100 MB/s.

Did anyone try using a OCZ Vertex in a T61 already?


>> Does anyone know what kind of controller Lenovo put in my T61? Or is
>> there some way to find out via the command line?
> 
> $(lspci [-v])
> 
> Generally, it's "SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM
> (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller".

That's what I'm getting with "lspci -v":

00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA 
AHCI Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 01 [AHCI 1.0])
         Subsystem: Lenovo ThinkPad T61
         Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
         I/O ports at 1c48 [size=8]
         I/O ports at 1c1c [size=4]
         I/O ports at 1c40 [size=8]
         I/O ports at 1c18 [size=4]
         I/O ports at 1c20 [size=32]
         Memory at fe226000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]
         Capabilities: [80] MSI: Mask- 64bit- Count=1/4 Enable-
         Capabilities: [70] Power Management version 3
         Capabilities: [a8] SATA HBA <?>
         Kernel driver in use: ahci

Model is:
[    4.884776] thinkpad_acpi: Lenovo ThinkPad T61, model 6457W2C


Best regards,
Jens