[ltp] New hard drive for T61

[Paul Seelig]

Hi John,

i bought a bigger replacement drive and, in a second step, a
second faster one just a few months ago. Both times it was a
Seagate Momentus 500GB disk in its G version, in order to have
the drive itself take care of any gravitational issues. First
drive was the 5400rpm speed version, and the second one the
faster 7200rpm speed version. There actually is a speed
difference, as the system does feel more responsive thanks to the
faster disk (running Debian/unstable). As an added benefit, the
7200rpm disk comes with a 5 year warranty.

I didn't bother to measure it, because i am not at all interested
in any numbers. Don't even really care about whether disk has
3.0Gbit/sec or 1.5Gbits/sec throughput. Just being able to simply
feel the enhanced responsiveness was already enough for me to be
content with the doubled disk upgrade.

The slower 5400GB Momentus is now in some cheap "Ultrabay Slim
SATA HDD Adapter II" imitation. I had to put a jumper on the disk
to limit its speed to a 1.5 Gb/s data rate, because there was an
issue for it being recognized by the T61 BIOS 3 (or even 4) out
of 5 times during startup.

The jumpering solution for this issue is fully described here:

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=193775
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=168595

Might be worth to have this info added to ThinkWiki by some kind soul.

In any case, it is nice to have so much superfluous disk space
available for some KVM virtual machines or simply for scratch,
using the second disk primarily as an almost identical backup
device by mirroring.

No, i don't endorse Seagate disks for any economic interest, but
i do happen to like their Momentus series quite a lot.

Cheers
P. *8^)

John Jason Jordan wrote:
> 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?