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[#1]

I'd like to upgrade the main disk in my W500 to 500GB, or possibly put the larger disk in an Ultrabay W500 carrier. I'd like APS to work for both drives.

Does anyone have any *actual* experience of using APS with such a high capacity drive?

I am thinking of the Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B family of drives (9.5mm height), but the OEM hardware manual does not mention any "Unload immediate" command (which--I hope I have this right--does not write unwritten cached buffers but immediately parks the drive), only the "Idle immediate" command with "unload" feature:

Unload Feature:
The UNLOAD FEATURE of the IDLE IMMEDIATE command allows the host to immediately unload the heads. The device stops read look-ahead if it is in process. If the device is performing a write operation, the device suspends writing cached data onto the media as soon as possible. The data in the write cache is retained, and the device resumes writing the cached data onto the media after receiving a Software Reset, a Hardware Reset, or any new command except IDLE IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD FEATURE

I phoned HitachiGST support, and they told me that large OEM's like Lenovo do order OEM versions of their drives with custom microcode, and Hitachi support were not informed of what features that might affect.

Conceivably the Lenovo drives might use a different command code for "Idle immediate" which the regular, unmodified drive microcode does not support.

Anyone with more information?

Message Edited by mjdl on 2009-08-01 10:30 PM

[#2]

I am ordering a Western Digital Scorpio under the assumption it will work in my T400 Ultra Slimbay.  Will let you know!

[#3]

Only the drive brought from Lenovo can support the full Thinkpad APS commands, rest of the drives you buy from the market would only support the head unload features AFAIK.

[#4]

Ah-ha, thanks for some confirmation of what I suspected: the APS driver may send different commands to do the same thing as the optional features of the SATA-II command I quoted. That's really unfortunate, although it may be a legacy of the fact that the APS features antedate the SATA specifications (although the APS driver could actually use the SATA query command to see if the optional command feature was implemented, assuming that the query command is consistently implemented in most recent disk firmware).

Lenovo does offer a disk firmware updater as a bootable ISO image at http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-63685 , but the maximum size for 7200 rpm disks listed there is 320GB.

[#5]

WD Scorpio Black has a built-in auto-park for heads. 320 BG max size. I have one in the slimbay of my T400 with an Intel X25-m as the boot drive.

[#6 · Accepted solution]

I ended up buying a Seagate 320GB 7200.3 7200rpm drive with the built-in "G-force" protection. Leaving APS activated hasn't lead to any compatibility problems: the drive does park when the notebook is jiggled, but I don't know if this is the result of the APS system or the built-in accelerometer.