[ltp] Upgrading hard drive on T61

[Dmitry E. Mikhailov]

On Thursday 06 August 2009 05:57, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Aug 2009 23:37:22 +0200
>
> Jochen Schulz <ml@well-adjusted.de> dijo:
> > Jens Rutschmann:
> > > Cherife Li wrote on 05.08.2009 19:48:
> > >> 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?
> >
> > http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=T_Series_Thinkpads&th
> >read.id=34685&page=23

> After spending half an hour reading the threads on that link I can see
> that it would be pointless for me to replace the hard drive.
>
> When I bought my T61 I was aware that it was SATA-1 speed, but I
> thought the limitation was in the hard disk. Now that I know that
> Lenovo deliberately crippled the IBM controller I am bummed. 

I don't see any problem with 100MB/s limit. Now very few desktop HDDs can read 
*linear* data at 100MB/s. What I've seen was in 50-80MB/s range. Laptop 
drives are definitely slower. And we talk here about linear access. With 
random access and time needed to reposition heads etc speed drops further. So 
the only way an HDD can do 100+ MB/s transfer it from/to it's tiny 8MB cache. 
But you got much larger and definitely much faster cache somewhere within 
multiple gigabytes of your maxed-up RAM. So why hurry? Get a bigger and/or 
faster (7200RPM) disk and you'll definitely feel the positive change.

Best regards, 
	Dmitry Mikhailov


By the way, top SSDs can do more than 100MB/s, but I wouldn't worry either. 
Anywhat with random access (read many little files) it would be times faster 
than HDD.