8510p with 2 HDDs? How about RAID?

Hello,
I would like to ask if you think or you already have two HDDs in this laptop - HP 8510p. I mean in exchange for DVD-RW. HP sells adapter for it: HP 80GB 5400 rpm Multibay II Hard Drive (PH357A) more details:

Code:

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06c/A10-51210-329227-329249-329227-423808-423809-423811.html?jumpid=oc_R1002_USENC-001_HP%2080GB%205400%20rpm%20Multibay%20II%20Hard%20Drive&lang=en&cc=us

however there is a note:
Note: MultiBay II devices require HP External MultiBay II Cradle, or MultiBay II Drive Bay found in the HP Advanced Docking Station or HP 3-in-1 NAS Docking Station

• Is there any reason for it? Is this adapter anyhow different from size of a standard DVD-RW drive? Is there any powersupply problem?
  
• I thought about removing the original 80GB HDD and replacing it with 200GB with 7200rpm, any1 tried this?
  
  
• How about RAID? (especially RAID 0) I don't mean software RAID done with Windows/Linux...
  
• Or at least use this one as a "huge" storage and buy a small SSD just for OS and documents.

What do you think?

 

The 8510p does not have a RAID capable chipset.

 

what a pity . Thx for reply. And how about those additional Q? Any1?

 

1. The 8510p does NOT support MultiBay II. Only the 6910p/6930p does.
2. You can replace the internal HDD with a 200GB 7200rpm SATA disk drive.

 

thank you all for replies. So is there any solution how to change internal DVD drive for a HDD?

 

There is no known solution unless you are willing to mod the systemboard connectors.

 

well unfortunately I'm ot willing to do that

however just fyi we need adapter with this connector:

 

Sorry for bringing up an old thread, but this can now be done (still no RAID support though):
Replace Optical Drive with Hard Disk

 

your link doesn't work so I guess it's this device:
http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid=m38&_nkw=SATA+2nd+Hard+Disk+Drive+HP-COMPAQ

compatible with:

 

You have a 12.7m PATA optical drive. Just buy a 12.7mm sata-to-pata optical bay caddy and your set. See here. Means you can install a 1TB 12.7m 2.5" SATA HDD if you wanted.

 

This is as close as I have come to finding a way to Raid my HDX.. I hope this helps..

http://www.photofast.tw/eng/SSD_G_Monster_V5.html

I would note... that I would raid the one ssd in a read only.. and use a raptor for the write portion.. or second drive.

Just my best opinion.. they are super fast but slc writting (which is best something long lasting) but very shallow or small space wise.. thus expensive.. but a SSD for the OS and apps.. is the best bang for the buck you can buy speed wise.. notice stable and speed are not the same word..

Maybe you know all this already and if you do sorry to butt in..

My best and I hope this helped, JW

 

that bay from ebay didn't fit. After all I had to buy it from here: http://newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=226 (verified and working) however crappy transfer speeds:

 

8510P has a PATA optical bay connector. Can you check in Device Manager against the Primary IDE channel to see if the optical drive comes up as Device 0 or Device 1 (there will be a transfer speed against one or the other)?

If it's Device 1, then it's a slave device. If it's Device 0, then it's a master device. newmodeus has the 2510P caddy with a jumperable board on it. The ebay sata-to-pata caddies don't have any such jumper. Likely master/slave mismatch is causing the delayed startup AND may be causing lower performance (or a slow xfer mode set by default.. changeable using 'hdparm -x udma2 /dev/sdb'.

See my sig for more details on optical bay caddies.

 

Yeah, have a look at this old thread. I would guess that yours being the same series as the 8710p/w would have the same crappy speed limitation on the caddy. So much so that it isn't really worth bothering with. We tried almost everything to no avail.

 

May I suggest you try the US$19 12.7mm sata-to-pata caddy? The 8510p uses the ICH8M's PATA controller for the optical bay with a maximum interface speed of UDMA5/ATA100. Supposed reports of 10/15MB/s are way under specification and if you follow the thread linked above the troubleshooting to check is somewhat dubious. So could be a US$19 test worthy of documentation for the benefit of others on here.

 

I bought a SATA second hard drive caddy on eBay for my HP 8510p, together with an external USB slim enclosure to hold the DVD burner. The USB enclosure works just fine but I got the same problem with the crappy transfer rate with the hard drive caddy.

It was weird even at the boot-up stage after the caddy got installed: my 8510p took longer to start booting and it seemed like it was trying hard to recognize that device (I couldn't boot from the hard drive caddy as it didn't show from boot list). I initially put my own hard disk (Seagate 7200.2 80GB which comes with the laptop) into the caddy and boot from a USB key with a Windows PE installed. I got a maximum 13MB/s for reading, by both benchmark softwares (HD Tune v2.5 and v3.5) and manual copying large files (over 600MB in size). More importantly, HD Tune v3.5 couldn't test the write mode and I got a system freeze-up when I tried to write large files into that drive (writing small files was fine). I then borrowed a hard drive from my roommate and booted into Windows XP but that didn't help anything. I also tried it with my roommate's nc8430 (HP's predecessor product line of 8510p) but ended up with the same problem.

I had a ThinkPad R50 before and I was happy to run a second hard drive within an Ultrabay Enhanced caddy. Since both 8510p and nc8430 are not designed with a swappable device on the optical slot, I started wondering if HP has made some hard-coded limitation on the PATA interface. Both machines only use PATA for 8x DVD burners - 11MB/s maximum, so users won't see this unless they try to put a hard drive there instead. If this is the case, I might have to choose using an eSATA external hard drive with a PCMCIA eSATA card (8510p doesn't come with an ExpressCard slot).

 

8510P is using ICH8M's PATA interface rated at 100MB/s read, 88.9MB/s write. Only way HP could have "hard-coded" the interface is if they left the IDE stub out as part of the IDE specification so the interface get's crazy reflections, dampening the performance as explained here.

Can you post pics of the caddy? BTW - a 2510P user figured out here how to set the ebay caddy as master - jumper JAE50 pin 47 (CSEL) to pin 49 or 45 (GND). By default it was in some unusual state.. BIOS detected it as slave, though we couldn't get it to work with the default 1.8" ZIF HDD that's set as. The 2510P is very similar in setup to a 8510P/6910b/6710p except it's primary bay HDD is a 1.8" ZIF.

That 2510P user is now enjoying 88MB/s reads and 65MB/s writes from his OCZ Vertex using the ebay sata-to-pata optical bay caddy.

 

I took some pictures of the caddy. Please take a look.

I shorted pin47 and pin45 of the caddy and tested it. Nothing changed except the reading now became a bit better - from 13MB/s to 14.3MB/s. Still couldn't perform any writing action or the system will freeze. I was wrong previously about this issue and thought writing small files was fine (in fact such writing were cached temporarily and when it was committed to harddrive, the system got frozen up immediately).

 

Try steps in Troubleshooting transfer mode issue with newmodeus sata-to-pata optical bay caddy. If not successful then the poor performance is likely due to signal reflections from unterminated lines.


Source: here.

This would indicate that there is likely an incorrectly terminated transmission line setup with crosstalk/noise, requiring some termination of lines as noted above. With the 2510P we've also noticed when a newmodeus caddy is set to slave that performance drops to 30MB/s reads. According to the PATA spec, master and slave should give identical performance. Left: JAE50 connector to apply device termination on from google translated page.

 

I followed the fix as well as manually setting into udma5, but the speed then was changed to a weird 211KB/s, and then changed back to mdma2 with 12.47MB/s.

 

Yep, exactly the same problems all of us had with the 8710w and others of that generation and previous gen eg. nx6320. I now have 3 of these caddies that I can't use. I have upgraded to 8530w's now, so I get factory 2nd HDD option, and RAID too, oh yes.

 

It took a credible 2510P owner, sfsilicon, to buy the US$28-delivered 9.5mm sata-to-pata caddy and prove it does work here and here is now enjoying 88MB/s seq read and 65MB/s seq write 0.1ms 60GB OCZ Vertex 2.5" SSD performance. A massive improvement over the supplied 1.8" 20/20 ZIF HDD. Similar sorts of postings were observed in the 6510b thread.

Suggestion

A credible 8510p owner takes a gamble with the US$19-delivered 12.7mm sata-to-pata caddy and post their results.

 

I am far from changing into a next generation 8530p. Instead, I will try with PCMCIA eSATA card connecting to external eSATA harddrives. Another option is to go with HP advanced docking station which has MultiBay II and ExpressCard slot. Is there any one who ever tried any brand of PCMCIA eSATA card on 8510p? Success or failure stories, and any recommendation or cautions as well? I just want to be knowledged much enough instead of wasting further efforts as well as time.

 

I rather suspect some limitations made by HP somewhere inside the machine hardware or firmware. I have an old-fasioned external harddrive enclosure that I am still using for a PATA 250GB Hitachi 3.5" harddrive. It was working fine all the time. However, when I tried to open the box and connect its PATA interface with a LITE-ON 18x DVD burner, I found the burning speed was quite limited and I couldn't burn with faster than 8x. I searched the Internet and was told that some vendors might have set a PIO mode for ATAPI optical devices in their firmware, even though harddrives are fine and can run with UDMA. Fortunately my enclosure was using a CYPRESS USB-to- ATA/ATAPI bridge which has all its setup data stored within an EEPROM. I got the program to read, modify the binary data and flash it back. Finally I made my DVD burner work on 16x with that USB enclosure. I won't be surprised if there is really some by-design limitations like that within a more complicated laptop. Instead of wasting time trying to figure out why and where the cause is, I would turn to other possibilities.

 

Yep, and we ALL got accused of incredulity on that other thread by a certain user too. Seems that if these $28 dollar caddies don't work on your laptop, then there is something wrong with you. It doesn't matter if 100% of users with a certain model can't get it to work, it just means there is something wrong with 100% of the users. It looks like someone here has some sort of undisclosed intrest in these caddies.

Also, forget about the multibayII in the docking stations, they are connected as USB2 drives, so no different to having a cheap external dive hooked up. And also forget about the 2008 docks with the newer SATA upgrade bay, they don'e even show up at all on these older laptops, not even as USB2!

I'm just trying to help other users here, stop them wasting money on these caddies that don't work on some HP laptops. Fine they work on an 2510p and others. but the one thing a certain user fails to acknowledge is that the ones it does work on ALL have the primary HDD and optical bay SHARING a single IDE channel. These ones that don't work have them on separate channels. This means HP can design the optical bay channel to have a slow max speed limit, which unfortunately it looks like they have done.

I even offered $200 to the first person who could show me how to get it working on my 8710w. and still no takers, that was several months ago.

 

Also, I went down this PCMCIA route too, with mixed results. Expresscard is the way to go. it is fast and reliable.

I found that PCMCIA would lock the machine for 5 seconds every once in a while when transferring files. And the transfer rates were about half that of the expresscard. And there were suspend/resume problems too. It could just be my particular PCMCIA card (VIA chipset).

Expresscard works well, but it isn't onboard (expresscard only available via docking station on 8710w). I have both a JMicron and SIL chipset cards, and I prefer the JMicron as it supports software RAID and gives massive throughput in that mode.

But then again I could be a JMicron employee too.

 

See this post for an answer. Optical bay channel is using the ICH8M PATA controller, rated at UDMA5/ATA100. Only way HP could have slowed it down is to set the interface link at a lower speed mode (eg: UDMA2) OR to not have terminated the signal wires incorrectly resulting in reflections and errors.

 

That would be a lot of work, even just to measure the circuits, then if that was the case, you would have some tricky soldering to do on top of that.

It is more likely that HP have put a simple low pass filter on one of the lines to cause errors beyond a certain frequency. That is what I'd do if I wanted to cripple the interface to a specified limit in hardware.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm sure this problem can be solved, given someone with enough time and expertise on their hands. I just found it easier/cheaper to upgrade to a new model myself.

 

Thanks for your information. I just started researching on different PCMCIA eSATA cards. It has been reported that those with VIA chipsets are more problematic and also slower compared to others, say Silicon Image chipsets. But it is more like the problems are made by the laptop instead of the card itself. For example, ThinkPad T61 is known as having a very low PCMICA performance which finally got fixed by BIOS update ( http://2xod.com/articles/Lenovo T61 Slow PCMCIA/).

Most of such cards on eBay are just non-brand without mentioning anything about the chipset. I know they are somehow sold or advertised under the brand 'AKE' which is however not labelled anywhere of the card. Could you post some pictures of your PCMCIA card with VIA chipset? Or does it look like one of the cards in following attatched pictures (which I found on eBay)? Hope that will help me to filter out some cards. I might instead take some card using SIL3112 or SIL3512 (which are quite popular also).







I am also surprised to know that the MultiBay II on HP advanced docking station is via USB. Fortunately the ExpressCard slot doesn't perform that way. Also, JMicron chips seem like not available for PCMCIA cards according to my Google results. I will go with some SIL cards first and hope they will work the way they are supposed to be.

 

It is exactly the same as that first one you pictured, with same number "BC178" on it. I remember it said something like "Hide Inside" on the eBay listing title.

 

Thank you. These are the non-branded ones and also the least priced ones (BC178 in the first picture and BC188 in the second picture. BC188 has one eSATA and one SATA while BC178 got two eSATA's). I will avoid taking those and see if I can find some cards with real SIL chipsets.

 

Slow optical bay caddy likely due to HP setting PATA optical interface to 33Mhz, rather than 66Mhz mode

There is two things HP are doing in the bios to slow down the master and/or slave pata optical drive interface with degraded HDD performance if using an optical bay caddy. Both the following are done on a DV2000. Only (2) is applied to a 2510P on it's slave channel only.

1/ setting the transfer rate to 33MB/s UDMA2 mode. See details and workaround.
2/ setting the optical bay IDE channel to run in 33Mhz mode, rather than 66Mhz mode. See details and workaround .

A DV2000 has the same "slowness" and it too has a primary sata bay and pata optical bay, so I'd say the 6510b/8710w/8510p may need corrective actions in above links. If this is the problem I'd suggest asking HP for a bios fix.

 

I've tried both however without any success - I just can't switch from mode mdma2 to udma5. I also did a batch which starts automatically at time of startup - no success:

even if I set device to udma5 manually it has no effect on transfer speeds.

I also tried the Bar-edit, unfortunately I don't have listed any IDE Controller as you do but just lots of Device ID: 2828 etc... while I don't have any idea what it is or how to modify it reasonable.
I also did tried this registry how-to:

Code:

http://neodon.blogspot.com/2006/07/little-known-tweak-to-boost-hard-drive.html

it didn't work for me

I also have Ubuntu 9.10 there are transfer speed just fine (about 30MB/s write from primary 7200rpm hdd).

Thank you for any piece of advice.

EDIT: I also did try safe mode - didn't helped - transfer speeds are still at 12MB/s in best case.

 

There is updated info on the slow IDE channel performance. I too confirm that Linux is not affected, only Windows is problematic. The MS IDE driver is slowing the slave channel on the 2510P down for some reason. Try replacing the "1011" with "3033" in the screenshot of baredit at the 0/31/1 IDE controller byte 54 and test transfer speed.

When you bootup in Linux, type "setpci -s 0:31.1 54.l" and report the result. If it's "3033" then you can see that Windows is changing it to "1011" as it does for me on the 2510P. So may need to figure out why it's doing that, or alternatively just try the Intel drive (came with ICH7M chipset utilitiyes) or the uniata driver. Uniata sounds promising but BSOD 0x7b's on my system.

 

my screenshots in that utility are completely different, I can't even identify what a controller is.

what is actually meant by that?

 

Use bar-edit, look at the controller at Bus 0, Dev 31, Func 1 (that's the ICH8M PATA controller used to control the optical drive. Can see some more screenshots and explanation here.

 

Unfortunately I don't have Func 1 - only Func 0 and Func 2 dunno why, even though I've ICH8M
please see attached picture:

 

As I don't have a 8510p, I cannot investigate further. I would say HP have hidden the PATA controller. A 8510P owner would need to investigate further by referring to the ICH8M I/O datasheet and poking data with baredit.

 

I'm wondering if this is possible to boot from the 2nd HDD?

And I think of purchasing the accessory in order to add 2nd drive, so is there any usage experience news form you guys (who are using some kinda multibay)?

Thanks.

I still love my 8510p

 

that is one of the problems - second HDD is not bootable - it's required to have a link from first hdd to boot

 

The 6910p bios has an Optical Drive option which you can use to disable. I assume the 8510p does as well. That might be needed so it doesn't write whatever it's writing to the IDE master drive to make it run at 12MB/s.

Enabling the port can be done with grub2 bootloader, DIY ViDock Setup 1.x (DOS/chainloading) or from within Windows itself. In Windows, run Baredit, change RCBA Function Disable bit 1 to 0 will enable the IDE port. Follow the Enabling the native SATA controller using baredit details here bit set bit1 rather than bit2.

Now the IDE device (0:1f.1) will appear so the workaround to the 33Mhz/66Mhz timing mentioned earlier can be checked as well.

Also, the 6910p schematic shows that pin45 of the ODD connector is a MULTIBAY detect signal. That pin may need to be either grounded or isolated for the bios see it as a "multibay" device rather than an optical drive.

 

well if the second HDD is visible for boot loader at least, it's not bad. I'm using GRUB usually. tnx =)


nando4
thank you for information. seems a bit unclear though at first; I will probably investigate it deeper later, since so far I have rather moved to my desktop.

 

I am experiencing the same speed like Honza007.

basicly i bought a x25-m G2 and moved the stock sata Hitachi 7200 into the caddy and it is now at mdma2 crashing and having to uncheck the dma check box in windows 7.. and now i am getting 1.5mb~ writes and reads...

can someone point out which caddy will at least get me some decent speed?

and nando4 thanks for the information.. i have tried them all, 66mhz, hdparm, regedit change... all do not work...

 

I believe the bios writes some stuff to the PATA port/drive to make it perform poorly. Try the "disable Optical drive" option in the bios which disables the PATA port. Then boot Windows, enable the PATA port (funtional disable register, bit 1) and do a device manager scan. Work through the details here to enable the PATA port (function disable register, bit 1).

 

Nando4

Thanks for this info. I did that already. However, when rescanning with device manager, the ATA controller shows up, but no HD attached to it. So its a no go.