W701 esata port suffering from poor design/quality from manufacture? [ Edited ]

[Christians86]

After having my W701 for 5 weeks, with 2 replacment of MB due to different problems, last time bios and port problems, I got i back from Lenovo today. I had reported it with a no functional/very poor functional esata port.

What happens is that:

With my lacire drive;

When I write to internaldrive everything is ok - when I write from my internal drive to the external it stops and says that the disc is no longer attached.

With my chieftech cabinet with esata port:

Writing from works fine - writing to starts good, then hangs for a minute or so - then drop from 50 MBps til 18 MBps, then continous, and does it again.

When I use them against my HP Homeserver EX495 it works like a charm, so non of the disk is the problem, unless the have some love for my HP, and hate Lenovo - but that would seem rather absurd to me.

The last MB didn't work better, and the new one dosn't either. Anyone who has an idea? I can't belive that 2 MB has the same problem, or? Allthough the IBM technician admitted when asked that he had not tested the esata port, he figured that since it was on MB, and that was changed it would work fine - but obviously that wasn't right.

edit:

I did another test now after packing a .rar file. The transfer to the lacie failed, but to chieftech it went fine. But - sending huge .tiff files was the reason of buying esata disk, so that dosn't really help me, other than telling that sending 100 files will crash, and 1 file is less probable to fail, but has currently a 50/50 chance of doing so.

I tried with the chieftech later - and it repeated the problem - it started with 6 MBps - den stopped - worked again - and so it kept on working.

How I tested this time:

1 file was zipped on my server - 2,5 GB (1)

1 file was zipped on the internal drive - 5,5 GB (2)

Transfer of file 1 from server to drive went fine to Chieftech , but failed on Lacie.

Transfer of file 2 from internal to both Cheiftech and Lacie failed big time. Chieftech froze explorer, and until I plugged the disk out by napping the cable out it wasn't possible to use the computer. Lacie failed after 5 seconds.

The first times I tried to transfer 129 files - and that didn't work any better.

[Christians86]

Doesn't anyone know?

Lenovo Norway can't help, support can't help, and the shops won't answer.

Also; why can't the W701 run other than Raid O or 1 - I would have liked to have one SSD drive and one normal harddrive, any ideas?

[andyP Community SuperMod]

Sorry, but I have no suggestions for solutions to your first post.

But, the W700 can run without RAID; you just need to turn it off. Backup all files before proceeding, during the boot process you can press CTRL + I to enter the RAID BIOS. Simply remove the drives from the RAID and install the OS to HDD 0 or 1. The other HDD will then be an "extra". After doing this you may also be able to hide RAID in BIOS, can't remember 100%, but should be do-able.

Hope this helps

[Jimbo]

Christians86, sorry to hear about your problems. I have no connection with Lenovo other than being a customer like yourself.

1) If you have an on-site repair contract with Lenovo (which I recommend) as part of your warranty, then don't let the technician leave until he/she tests whether you still have the same problems. The fact that the technician didn't test for that was poor performance on his or her part.

2) I would run all the tests with both your W701 and esata drive plugged into AC power, with both plugged into the same surge protector or power strip.

3) Right-click on the battery icon in your system tray (near the lower-right corner of the screen), and select "Launch Power Manager..." Click on the "Advanced" button within Power Manager, and temporarily select the Maximum Performance setting for all of your esata tests.

4) If you've had errors during writing to your esata disk, then it may now be corrupted. So it would be wise to connect the drive to the computer with which it works properly, and run scandisk to correct any errors on the drive, before doing further testing (these instructions tell you how to run scandisk, but be sure to run it on your esata drive instead of the C: drive).

Plus I've seen many reports of people having problems hot-plugging esata drives under Windows. So for all of your tests I would plug in and unplug the drive from the computer only while the computer was shut down. Once you get it to successfully pass your tests, only then would I consider plugging/unplugging it while the computer is still turned on.

5) Test with more than one esata cable, using the shortest cables that you can.

Best of luck!

[Christians86]

I have now been working with Lenovo Norway, who cant/wont help since the last post. I couldnt use CTRL - I on mine, for unknown reasons, I think I tried that while I had the SSD drive.

And the esata problem is there still - Support dont know why, Lenovo Norway dont know why, they wont swap it, and the shop dosnt answer, (It has gone to that extent that Eurocard cancelled the payment one week ago, returned my money and said that they would ask the shop - but thats no gurantee that I will keep the money if the shops wins)

I have tried basically everything with the esata, also tried changing in the BIOS from raid to ACHI to compaility (wich left me with BSOD), nothing works.

Now they changed how service works, so UPS were supposed to pick it up on monday, and today - but they never showed, and support cant do much about it other than saying that "we will escalte it", which to me is soon the same as "forget it".

[Christians86]

Just as a update as of today;:

UPS didn't show up today either - or, they drove past Hafslunds main office on the other side of our Officebuilding, stopped there, then stopped 1 minute at our fron entrance, but no one called me, and then they drove of.

Yesterday I had sent a sms to one at Lenovo Norway and asked about this:

"Hi, no one is picking up my computer after I have called twice. Tomorrow is the third dayI have to wait for someone to come, before it has to take one week before it might be back, why is that?"

He called also today, after I had called support and asked them to explain why someone yesterday promised that UPS was supposed to come, and they - well, did, but not for my computer obviously. So now I have the promise of a technician to come and pick up my computer, and he/her I won't let go until the person understands that the computer should be treated as if everything is wrong with it and don't delivered back until they fix it - which I don't consider ever happening.

I can't understand that it should be a user fault - as I have tried clean install, format and reformat, bios and you name it for hours until I gave up.