Hard Drive Bay Adapter on T61p

Hi,

I'm thinking about buying a Hard Drive Bay Adapter for the ThinkPad T61p and I'm wondering which one do I have to buy for this laptop... Also, will it be SATA and as fast as my primary Hard Drive ?

Thank you for helping me

 

The Ultrabay hard drive adaptor is a huge bottleneck on the T61p. It's about half the speed of the primary drive bay. Maybe less. It's better than nothing but frankly you are better off spending money on a eSATA or USB 3 expresscard and going that route if you really want speed.

 

That's what a friend told me... He changed his T61p for a T410 for this reason...

 

The T61 uses the PATA interface on their Ultrabay Slim which is old and slow compared to the SATA interface on the newer models (for T400 onwards). The official Ultrabay Slim HDD Adapter for the T61 series will only accept 2.5" PATA drives.

Though you can still buy an unofficial (Fenvi) hard drive adapter for the T61 that allows you to install the new 2.5" SATA hard drives in but they won't run the full SATA speeds you'll expect. Overall you would only buy these adapters if storage is top priority, not for performance.

 

that is actually incorrect, Lenovo does have SATA hdd adapter for the T6x series.

Ultrabay Slim SATA HDD Adapter - ThinkWiki

Marketing PN: 40Y8725 FRU PN: 26R9246

 

Ah guess so! I've tried looking on Lenovo's site but it had nothing on this since I guess they only concentrate on the new SATA UltraBay Slim Caddy III nowadays...

So I guess the T61 has 2 official caddies then that come in both PATA and SATA forms then?

 

SSDs will be limited to ~150 MB/sec sequential speeds but no current spinning hard drive will be limited by this adapter.   since most people using an SSD and modded BIOS will install it in the main drive bay and not the adapter, it's a non-issue.

 

That is incorrect. I have benchmarked the Ultrabay driver adaptor in the T61p, T400, W500, T410, and W510. The poorest performance comes from the T61p ultrabay hard drive adaptor. If what you are saying were true, you wouldn't see a speed difference in the T61p primary drive bay, and the ultrabay with a standard 7200rpm drive. You do.

Most people don't use modded BIOS. And the original question wasn't about SSD.

If you are going to use a T61p, the only reason to use the ultrabay hard drive adaptor is for convenience. I do.

But when you really need speed for something like a huge virtual machine, you should plan on using eSATA or USB 3.0 via the ExpressCard slot.

The ultrabay perf issues were resolved in the T400, W500 series of machines and later.

 

with all due respect, in four years of using that adapter in T6x/X6x systems i've never found any limitations in real world, sequential transfer speeds using 7200 RPM drives.   heck, i can't even get over 100 MB/sec copying files in windows from two 15K RPM SAS drives in a workstation let alone a notebook.

synthetic benchmarks will fool you.   try a real-world test and tell me i'm incorrect.   feel free to post pics.

 

Real world? How about three years of using two of them?

I already made my recommendation. Buy the hard drive adaptor for convenience only. If you think it's the same speed as the primary bay or other options, you must work for Lenovo. That's the BS line they've been trying to stick with since it was discovered when that series came.

 

i'd like to see this claim quantified, that's all.   when i had a T61p i benchmarked the SATA UltraBay adapter at ~117 MB/sec and the main drive bay at ~142 MB/sec using the same SSD.   that's neither half nor enough to "bottleneck" any current 7200 RPM HDD in real-world file transfers.

btw, "real world" means anything outside of synthetic benchmarks.

 

If you're just using a platter based drive, it can't exceed SATA I speeds anyway. I had the adapter for my R60. It seemed about the same to me and if it's just for storage, who cares how fast it is. I'd go for storage over speed for a secondary drive. I think, like erik, it's unlikely you'd notice much of difference in real world usage.