t61 does not operate at SATA-II speeds?!

[Mark_Lenovo Former Administrator · Accepted solution]

All,

I've investigated this issues at length through engineering and have received the following explaination of SATA data rates available on the Santa Rosa ('61) and current Montevina based systems (T400/T500, W500, W700, etc)...

"For Santa Rosa-based systems, the Intel ICH8 supports a SATA bus speed of up to 3.0 Gb/s. Lenovo made a design decision to prioritize maintaining compatibility with Ultrabay disk drives, which are connected via a SATA-to-PATA conversion chip which could not handle a 3.0 Gb/s SATA bus speed reliably. Therefore the system was standardized to 1.5 Gb/s.

In testing rotating media drives, our measurements show data throughput difference between 1.5 Gb/s and 3.0 Gb/s bus speed is less than 5% since the drive mechanics are the limiting throughput factor, rather than the SATA bus itself.   

For those customers who choose to purchase an after-market SSD drive capable of SATA bus speeds up to 3.0 Gb/s, the system will interface with them at 1.5 Gb/s. Lenovo's official position is that the Santa Rosa systems are working as designed.

The Montevina based systems which began shipping last year have direct SATA interfaces for both drive bays and are enabled at a system level for SATA bus speeds of 3.0 Gb/s performance. Current Lenovo drives have firmware set to 1.5 Gb/s data rates.

Exchanging these drives for after-market drives which support SATA bus of 3.0 Gb/s should provide for the higher data rate at the overall system level. Again, it should be noted that our performance measurements show less than 5% performance improvement between 1.5 Gb/s and 3.0 Gb/s SATA bus speeds for rotating drives, since the drive mechanics are the limiting throughput factor, rather than the SATA bus itself.

After-market SSDs which support SATA bus speed of 3.0 Gb/s will operate at that bus speed. Depending on the data transfer test method used, your actual data throughput from a 3.0 Gb/s SATA bus speed should be 220-250 MB/s and about 90-120MB/s throughput when running on SATA bus of 1.5 Gb/s. This is due to the bus signaling used for the SATA bus, as well as overhead for error checking."

[kotovsky7]

Mark ,

isn't Ultrabay and main drive located on separate SATA channels ?

According to ICH8 specs chip able to negotiate different speeds on different channels ?

[oskarbosch]

Just shows you that current Lenovo engineering is not what is used to be.

Turning down drive throughput performance, inability to hot dock/undock with the newer models.

Would be nice to get some good old IBM engineering and oversight back in there. It is going downhill.......

And especially interesting to note that an Acer laptop, which was bought for probably half the price, outperforms the supposed to be king of notebooks... If I only could use an apple!!!! 

[hp79]

Mark, thanks for your clarification.

I'm pretty sure there are alot people that don't use a second PATA hard disk in the Ultrabay. I understand compatibility comes first, and that's why it's speed capped. Anyways, is adding an option in the BIOS setting to be able to switch between SATA1 and SATA2 impossible? After adding those two options, the developers can add a comment on those settings saying SATA1 for Ulatrabay 2nd HDD or something like this.

When using mechanical hard disk drives, no one would really care if it is SATA1 or 2. I don't think it will be even 5% difference. You can tell the engineers, they made a good decision back then, different story now. People are starting to move towards faster SSDs like intel's X25-M or X25-E, and at some point, find out the speed cap, google, and see answers like 'congratulations, you just discovered the speedcap on thinkpads'. They sure will start complaining about it. This is not just 5% difference here we are talking about when using SSDs. It is more like 100% difference when justs looking at Disk reading speeds. This won't traslate directly to x2 faster system, but still, limiting the capability is totaly wasting money on consumers point of view. I really hope something can be done to unleash the SATA cap.

Thanks,

Hoon

X61 tablet & X61s user

[treydur]

add me to list of T61P owners who are VERY unhappy about this. I dont care if I have to do a complete reinstall and apply setting to BIOS. I want 3G speed. This is bunk-ola. SSD prices have fallen to a point where I can get a nice 128GB drive at a price that works for me. I do massive application and data and would definitley benefit from SSD Sata II speeds.

I am not going to buy another Lenovo at any price when I can get some no name laptop that out performs mine for less than 1/2 the price.

Let's get with it Lenovo......uhm, NOW. Go ask your girlfreinds over at Intel, maybe they can help you get this to work via Bios update so they can sell some X25m's. In a bad economy only the most fit companies will survive, this is not the way to acheive that goal.

Message Edited by treydur on 02-17-2009 12:46 PM

[jketzetera]

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Mark_Lenovo wrote:

All,

I've investigated this issues at length through engineering and have received the following explaination of SATA data rates available on the Santa Rosa ('61) and current Montevina based systems (T400/T500, W500, W700, etc)...

"For Santa Rosa-based systems, the Intel ICH8 supports a SATA bus speed of up to 3.0 Gb/s. Lenovo made a design decision to prioritize maintaining compatibility with Ultrabay disk drives, which are connected via a SATA-to-PATA conversion chip which could not handle a 3.0 Gb/s SATA bus speed reliably. Therefore the system was standardized to 1.5 Gb/s.."

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Mark,

I am afraid that I do not understand the quoted explanation for limiting the SATA bus to 1.5 Gb/s.

The Ultrabay in the 60 and 61 series of Thinkpads is connected to a PATA port and not to a SATA port. This is also the reason why the Ultrabay SATA adapters contain SATA to ATA/133 bridge electronics, while the Ultrabay PATA adapters are simply mechanical adapters.

The above construction is the reason why a SATA disk will perform better when run in the "main bay", as compared to in the Ultrabay (using an Ultrabay SATA adapter causes overhead in the SATA to ATA conversion thus degrading performance even lower than of the 1.5Gb/s SATA port in the main bay).

I imagine that the reason for this Ultrabay design decision, is that the optical drives at the time when the 60 and 61 series were designed were PATA and not SATA.

However, back to the main issue.

As the Ultrabay is connected to the IDE port on the Intel ICH8 chipset, I cannot understand how reducing the SATA bus speed (on the SATA port) has any impact whatsoever on the stability of running SATA disks in the Ultrabay.

[RyanClark]

What message is Lenovo trying to send here?  

The Santa Rosa Thinkpads have an obvious firmware bug.  Meanwhile every other vendor has Santa Rosa notebooks that function correctly.

The bad publicity from this could easily exceed the cost of having an engineer fix the firmware.  SSDs are only becoming increasingly popular, so more and more customers will encounter this.  It could seriously harm Thinkpad's reputation among performance-conscious customers.  

I believe Lenovo is miscalculating.

[treydur]

jketzetera

the way your post reads, it seems to say the 2nd bay is the only bay that is 1.5, I believe you will find both primary and secondary are limited.

[jketzetera]

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treydur wrote:

jketzetera

the way your post reads, it seems to say the 2nd bay is the only bay that is 1.5, I believe you will find both primary and secondary are limited.

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I probably should have expressed myself more clearly.

Drives inserted in the main bay are connected to a SATA port with 1.5 Gb/s maximum transfer speed.

Drives inserted in the Ultrabay are connected to a PATA/IDE port (I am guessing it has a maximum of 133 MB/s in transfer speed).So, the Ultrabay is actually limited to an even lower transfer speed than 1.5 Gb/s.

Since the Ultrabay has no apparent connection with the SATA-part of the motherboard (remember that any SATA disk inserted into the Ultrabay utilizes the bridge electronics in the Ultrabay adapter itself that converts SATA to IDE), I cannot understand why the Ultrabay is stated as the reason for limiting the main bay SATA speed to 1.5 GB/s.

[jketzetera]

If it really is the case that the ICH8 chipset is unable to run the SATA-port at 3.0 Gb/s while simultaneously utilizing the PATA/IDE-port, then I do not think we can fault Lenovo for the current situation (we can fault them for the poor communication surrounding this issue but that is another thing altogether).

If Intel's chipset simply is unable to perform according to its rated specification, then there is little that Lenovo can do. Also, do not forget that SATA optical drives are relatively new.

However, given that there does not seem to be complaints on other manufacturers notebooks (that also use ICH8 and have optical and extra hard drive bays) having their SATA-ports restricted to 1.5 Gb/s, I am unsure if it is Intel's chipset that is unable to perform according to specifications.

Also, Mark or someone else from Lenovo should give a new official statement on this issue, as the current statement is either incorrect or is omitting crucial details.

Message Edited by jketzetera on 02-18-2009 05:30 AM