[PLUG] Fixed T60 slow ultrabay problem

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:18:58 -0800
Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> dijo:

>  Last night, I found the problem.  The BIOS settings
>  for the SATA controller somehow got changed from AHCI
>  mode to Compatability mode.  When I set the BIOS to AHCI,
>  hdparm -t went back to 79MB/sec.  Back to 3 hours.  
>
>Some windoze folks have problems with AHCI unless they load
>the right Intel drivers.  So the default is Compatability
>mode, even if it makes the Ultrabay slow as hell.  BTW, the
>T60 Ultrabay actually has a PATA interface, and the swap tray
>has a translator chip to SATA in it.  Kludge!  The newer
>Thinkpads feed both SATA and PATA to the Ultrabay, IIRC.

This sounds vaguely familiar.

My T61 has a SATA II controller, but to ensure compatibility with
drives of other types that a user might put in an Ultrabay adapter
Lenovo decided to throttle it to 100 MB/s. From information I gathered
on the Thinkpad e-list this was lame, but there you are.

I have a fast 320 GB SATA II drive in the Thinkpad, and a slower 500 GB
SATA II that I mounted in the Ultrabay. I use the Ultrabay drive for
backups, and it's slow, although not nearly as slow as yours before you
fixed the BIOS setting. It takes about an hour to use rdiff-backup to
copy the 220 GB on the main drive; longer or shorter depending on how
many new files there are to back up.