[ltp] New hard drive for T61

[John Jason Jordan]

When Karmic goes final next week I plan to do a reinstall. But instead
of wiping the 160 GB hard drive that came with my T61 I want to buy a
new drive, then put the old drive in a USB enclosure. After the new
install I'll copy over ~/ and perhaps other things as needed to get
things back to the way they currently are (installed programs, etc.).

Normally I do a dist-upgrade, but for some time I have been having
issues with Xorg or Gnome or something on Jaunty. I have spent entire
days trying to fix it, but there are literally hundreds of libraries,
modules, configurations and so on. I give up. 

I'd like a somewhat larger hard disk than the Hitachi 5416 that came
with the Thinkpad, maybe around 300 GB. From past discussions that I
have read here there are a couple issues:

1) My dim understanding is that Lenovo did something in the BIOS so
that only hard drives bought from them will work. However, I think that
is not entirely correct. 

2) I understand that my T61 has a SATA-2 controller, but Lenovo
throttled it to no more than 100 Mb/s. Hence, there is no point in
getting a faster hard disk. Yet there may be other issues that would
make disk access faster. If possible, I would like as fast a disk as
possible, given the controller situation.

So my question is: Are there any T61 users here who have installed
larger hard disks? If so, what did you install, and are you happy with
its performance?