[ltp] Upgrading hard drive on T61

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:54:07 +0200
Jens Rutschmann <Jens.Rutschmann@gmx.info> dijo:

> > 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.

I would be interested in confirmation of this also. Basically I just
want to speed up my T61, and faster disk access seemed to be the best
route, considering that I've already maxed out the RAM. But if Lenovo
is throttling disk access there would be little gain from a disk
upgrade. Assuming that they really are limiting the transfer rate, I
can only surmise that the purpose is to hold down power consumption,
because otherwise it makes no sense.

> 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

I get practically the same thing:

00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA 
AHCI Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 01)
	Subsystem: Lenovo Device 20a7
	Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 2297
	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] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit- Queue=0/2 Enable+ 
	Capabilities: [70] Power Management version 3
	Capabilities: [a8] SATA HBA <?>
	Kernel driver in use: ahci

One difference is where Jens has "Mask- 64bit- Count=1/4 Enable-" I
have "Mask- 64bit- Queue=0/2 Enable+." I have no idea what that means.

How can I tell if I have the 945 or 965 motherboard?