*HP 2510p Owners Lounge*

ok, so the Indilinx controller includes sata support, so then they have to use a sata to pata bridge chip... I imagine that would increase power consumption and decrease compatibility.

the OCZ Apex SSD is more or less the same design and the Photofast V2 drive, and from looking at benchmarks if the partition is aligned correctly it seems to have about as good performance has the Samsung SSD in my 2510p now...so maybe it is an option after all.

 

So are we looking at the same performance/power consumption as a Indilinx SSD + SATA-PATA caddy? Will the drive power off if not used because of the bridge? Getting Idle and Use rate would be nice.

BTW, has anyone done benchmarks using an Indilinx SSD with a PATA to SATA bridge? I have a 2.5 Patriot Torqx drive right now that I'm testing on an old PC and it is fast. Windows XP boot-up is around 30s on an old Celeron D 330 with 2GB of DDR1. Sadly no SATA to PATA caddy.

Nando4, given that the Indilinx controller only supports SATA natively I'm wondering if I should just buy a DVD caddy and run a hybrid SSD/HDD config using the 80GB 1.8" drive plus a Indilinx drive in the caddy. Can you boot from the caddy? Can you dump the 1.8" drive and just run off the caddy?

 

Here is the latest responses from Jason from dvnation. I also referred him to this thread so he might chime in. At least he knows that we are looking to dvnation for the G-Monster drives.

 

Jason is right about pretty much any Photofast SSD being faster than a 4200rpm 1.8" hard drive...

I'm actually thinking about picking up the 128GB V2 drive for my 2510p, should be about the same speed as my Samsung as long as the partition table is aligned correctly and I could really use the extra space.

 

It's not hard is it?

How do you do this? Can you share more info about this? Any chance of stuttering? What about power consumption?

Have you considered other drives like the Kingspec?

 

The easiest way to align your partition table correctly for these less fast SSD's is to just let the Windows Vista installer do it since it automatically aligns new partitions at 1024k.

I've looked at the Kingspec drive, but I've only found it on ebay and I'm not sure what controller(s) it uses. That and with dvnation warranty replacements are done through them so that's kinda nice.

 

Can do a few things to make the proposed config work:

- run the 1.8" ZIF as slave by bridging pin 1 and pin 2 on the cable (described earlier)
- run the optical bay caddy + Indilinx SATA SSD as master
- there's bios options to select if you want to boot off Notebook Hard Drive (master) or Optical Disk (slave)
- In such a config, I wish the DVD could be made to run as master so then I could still swap in the DVD and, boot of the ZIF HDD, but haven't figured that out yet).

Here is a collection of benchmarks of 1.8" ZIF SSD plus SATA SSDs using sata-to-pata bridge adapters. Notice the ultrabay sata-to-pata adapter gives 87MB/s, using the same Marvell sata-to-pata bridge as is on the ebay optical bay caddys.

Preliminary pricing suggests the G-Monster V3 price-per-gb is twice what say a 2.5" G-Skill Falcon SATA SSD would cost. So I think it doesn't represent value for money. A hybrid 2.5" SSD via optical bay caddy + 1.8" HDD being the value option, but it has it's pros/cons as well.

 

I think I have the F.0E bios. CPUZ reports: "68MSP Ver F.0E".

I'm not sure if I have an extra controller, but I might have one. From my device manager here is what I see.

IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
+ Intel(R) ICH8M Ultra ATA Storage Contollers - 2850
+ Primary IDE Channel
+ Primary IDE Channel
+ Ricoh SD/MMC Host Controller
+ Secondary IDE Channel
+ Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller <-- is this it?

Could the second controller be related to the CF card? I don't have a CF card installed so that might be why it is not showing up. From what I recall the CF controller is also from Ricoh.

 

If there are bios options for booting off slave, why not connect the optical caddy drive as slave and boot from it? Just trying to clarify. You might be giving me all possible options, but I'm looking for the simplest configuration where I keep both drives in permanently and boot off the caddy drive.

 

Yes.. the secondary IDE controller might be related to the CF card. I disable mine in bios yet the controller still it appears in the device manager.

You are correct. Simplest is to jumper the optical bay caddy as slave, exactly as the optical drive is and set boot menu to boot of "Optical Disk Drive" (this is slave). Works fine with the newmodeus sata-to-pata caddy since it's master/slave jumperable. Only reason you might want the optical bay caddy to run as master is for full performance. Running a SSD in caddy as slave *might* give lower performance than if running the caddy as master.

Whichever caddy you go, I'd be interested in knowing the performance you get with the Indilinx SATA SSD (OCZ Vertex/G.Skill Falcon). Might be worth replicating your config. I'd be curious if you acquired the ebay caddy, just as a comparison point. The ebay caddy is unproven by a credible 2510P owner as yet and doesn't have a slave jumper. Though pin47 CSEL *might* be able to be isolated to set it as slave, depending on if the sata-to-pata chip reads that pin to configure itself. By credible I mean a forum member that doesn't just appear, show pics of the caddy and a 2510P, make claims it doesn't work, then disappear again, or add similar comments to the 6510b caddy thread, adding a $ystem upgrade bia$ to mix.

 

Hi NANDO4,

I've been reading up on your SATA in 2510p thread and I'm trying to figure out what the current status is. I'm feeling adventurous, but I don't want to spend money for nothing if there I need a different bios than the F.0E that I have.

How can I tell if my secondary controller is the SATA controller or not?

I have a cardbus CF adapter in my 2510p right now I can quickly add a CF card and see if the above second controller is related to it.

Do you still need that southbridge shot of the 2510p?

Can you also point me to the posts where the non-credible person posted that the cheaper ebay caddy did not work? The only thing I could find was someone who had trouble installing vista from a usb key. He might have had a typical problem where you need to edit the boot drive identifiers in Windows that are mixed up when you install from USB and then remove the usb drive.

If I were to buy the replacement 2730p adapter and plug it in the 2510p what else would I need?

 

Thanks Nando4. I need to digest this a bit.

I did quickly install my CF card and it doesn't seem to be related to the CF adapter.

Here is how my Device Manager looks like with the CF card inserted.

IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
+ Delkin CardBus adapter << new
+ Intel(R) ICH8M Ultra ATA Storage Contollers - 2850
+ Primary IDE Channel
+ Primary IDE Channel
+ Ricoh SD/MMC Host Controller
+ Secondary IDE Channel
+ Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller

PCMCIA adapters
+ Ricoh R/RL/5C476(II) or compatible CardBus controller << new

 

Been doing some research and found some information on the part numbers and availability of the Photofast G-Monster V3 ZIF drives:

• PhotoFast G-Monster 1.8" ZIF SSD PF18Z32GSSDZIFV3[32GB] 29,800yen = $308.47
• PhotoFast G-Monster 1.8" ZIF SSD PF18Z64GSSDZIFV3[64GB] 39,800yen = $412.04
• PhotoFast G-Monster 1.8" ZIF SSD PF18Z128GSSDZIFV3[128GB] 64,800yen = $670.81

This is from the conics.net website:
- shipping from "approx 2nd week July 2009"
- Item is delayed 1-2 weeks (not sure if this puts it to shipping end of July)
- max read: 100MB/sec, max write: 100MB/sec

 

sfsilcon . I've cleaned up the post Theory: enabling and connecting to the ICH8M native SATA port post to make it more palatable if you want to have a go at native SATA 2510P support, with updated info as well. It Would be great to remove the "Theory" from the title, which is where I'm at the moment with it.

What else do you need? Need a 1.8" SATA HDD or SSD to plug the other end of the 2730P cable into

Now if you did go down that track there could be a backup plan if that unknow connector in 1.8" bay turns out to not be a SATA port. Could consider making your own sata-to-pata bridge as described here. Likely to be more power efficient than the optical bay caddy's sata-to-pata bridge since you could bypass the need for 5V -> 3.3V voltage regulators, since the 1.8" ZIF connector already has 3.3V signals.

I pass the baton with 2510P and native SATA support. If it works it would be brilliant.

 

Anyone willing to spend $25 to buy a used 2510p motherboard?

Ends: Jul 02, 200916:06:40 PDT

http://cgi.ebay.com/1-HP-451719-001-2510P-LAPTOP-NOTEBOOK-MOTHERBOARD_W0QQitemZ380134835564QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAU_Components?hash=item5881cd456c&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=65%3A15|66%3A2|39%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A50

 

I've been looking at the white unlabled 24 pin connector in the drive bay of the 2510p and it doesn't look like the SATA connectors used in the 2710p or 2730p. I'm not sure what it is for, but I could not find any SATA connectors that fit that type of connector. Most are either the standard SATA or micro SATA. Some have LIF connectors or plugs similar to what is used on the the 2510p opposite of the ZIF. I think this is a dead end, but I want to see if I can easily open the 2510p case and see if there are any other connectors or spots where they can be mounted.

I'm only interested in a native solution due to the potential speed advantage of a non-constricted interface (SATA vs PATA w/ 100MB/s limit). If none is possible then I'm going with a ZIF SSD or caddy.

 

The 2710P also only *officially* has 1.8" ZIF connector for it's HDD. It too has an unused 24-pin connector that looks like an exact match to the 2730P connector. Both the 2710P and 2510P have ICH8M I/O chipsets which have a SATA controller on it. By induction then, is the 2510P sporting a different plug to a SATA connector? Did HP have a SATA or PATA 1.8" HDD option set to go for the 2510P, but pulled the plug on it (literally), erasing all SATA remnants from bios also to make sure users upgrade to 2530Ps instead?

 

Just took my 2510p apart in search of any additional SATA connectors and in hopes of getting a good shot of the south bridge. The bad news is that I was not able to find any additional connectors or pins. I was not able to get a picture of the backside of the motherboard since that would have required taking it out of the backcover which was a step to far for me. I didn't want to worry about a reconnecting a whole bunch of cables. Anyway I did get some shots of the top and several of the chips on the top side of the 24 pin connector. I got several hires ones and will look to host them somewhere and share them here later.

 

This discussion is very interesting.
Where can we see this compatibility list?

 

Makes sense, but unless we can find someone that has information about the SATA 24-pin out for the 2730p we are stuck. Or as per your suggestion someone gets a motherboard and traces the pins back to the southbridge. My attempts at disassembling the 2510p didn't get far since I chickened out before removing the MB. There are just too many connectors and cables that can break or get pinched for me to risk it. So I guess we are back to the V3 and SATA caddies. I'm hoping you get some information back from Photofast on the power consumption.

 

From Photofast. Try emailing them.

 

Thanks NANDO4, there was a lot to read so I missed that.

I'm assuming they understand the ZIF connector spec better than Runcore. The HPminiuser forum is full of compatibility issues with connectors with their 1.8" ZIF PRO series.

I'd be willing to test the drive on a 2510p for a discount. They should also test it on the HP mini, MacAir v1 and Fujitsu Lifebooks that use 1.8" ZIF.

I'm just praying for a 1.8 ZIF drive SSD with similar or better power consumption as the current 1.8 4200 drive that I have and that will fully saturate the ATA channel with 100MB/s read/write instead of losing 12% performance to the bridge. $200 pricing for 64MB would be great.

 

Not sure if this has been already posted, but this is why I am staying away from SSDs with Jmicron JMF602/B controllers. That goes also for the dual controller configurations.

 

So I though I'd post some comparison benchmarks for how I have my 2510p configured right now. It currently has my Samsung 64GB 1.8" ssd installed as master and also has a Western Digital 320GB pata drive installed as slave in the optical drive bay via the Newmodeus drive caddy and a pata circuit board.

On the left we have the Samsung and on the right we have the Western Digital:

 

The cache (16MB or 32MB?) on the HDD makes quite a difference for the 4k R/W numbers. Thanks for sharing.

 

8MB of cache on that drive...still makes a pretty big difference though.

 

I would have rather used the sata circuit board and a 500GB drive, but it impacted my battery life too much.

 

So the 2730p pinout is not documented in anyway? If we had that it would be easier to guess which were the relevant pins then map it to the socket.

BTW, does anyone know what the socket type is in the 2510p/2710p? That would give us an idea where pin 1 is and in which direction the higher pins are oriented.

I'm going to test the ebay pata-sata caddy. That has a reasonable chance of success and coupled with an Indilinx SSD maybe decent performance with higher power consumption. I messaged the seller on eBay a few days ago about 2510p support and have not gotten any response. Not a good sign in general. I'll share results when I have a chance.

BTW, I got my Intel 4965AGN mini PCIe wireless card with Draft N support. The card was easy to install and I just DL the drivers from Intel.com. The card works in g mode, but I need to add a third antenna to enable the N mode. Strangely the Intel drivers do not allow a manual override to N. Just a tip make sure you buy a card that has the extra antenna to avoid the hassle. Now I'm going to see if I can easily reroute one of the antennas for the wireless broadband to the WiFi port.

 

Hey Pocket_Geke what impact are you seeing on your battery life? What kind of battery do you have (3/6/9 cell?)

 

2730 24-pin 1.8" SATA connector pinouts = unknown.
2530P 8-pin 1.8" SATA connector pinouts = unknown.

microsata only needs 6 wires to run, so likely only using a few of those pins in that 24-pin socket anyway. Only way of mapping it's pins is a close up view of the tracks OR to get the cable and do continuity probes against the ends. The 2510P socket itself has little numbers against the pin numbers which I've shown at the bottom of this post.

Look forward to hearing your results. As mentioned, I believe this thread and the 6510b optical bay caddy thread has had inaccurate reporting of the ebay sata-to-pata caddy's performance. A credible 2510P owner can perhaps give a more accurate report. Comparatively, the ebay caddy looks to be more of a flush-fit and I'm curious whether the Marvell sata-to-pata bridge might be slightly better performing as shown by the mtron-in-sata-to-pata ultrabay performance here. Ultrabay and ebay caddy both use the same Marvell bridge chip as shown here and here.

 

A possible way of probing the pinout would be attaching an oscilloscope or simply a device for measuring impedance and go through the pins.
Perhaps it's possible to compare the signals with a desktop sata-controller.

 

With the Sata circuit board it uses somewhere between 3/4 and 1 watt more. Since I normally get ~12 hours of battery life out of my 9 cell battery this cuts it down to ~10.

Also, my 2510p came with the Intel 4965 from HP and it only has 2 antennas connected, so I don't think the 3 one is absolutely necessary.

 

Are you sure you get 12 hours with a 9 cell? That would imply 6.9W average load (83Whr/9-cell), 8hrs from a 6-cell too. If so, that's quite impressive. Though if you are using the Windows meter while on battery, then it isn't accurate.. it jumps around based on load and likely your sytem is 6.9W (shows 12hrs) when in low load/idle state.

A very accurate battery life indicator is batterybar, since it keeps some history data. Can you check your battery life with batterybar?

 

I get between 11 and 12 hours on it 4 days a week and that's actual run time, not what the meter says. That's with brightness set at 4 notches from dimmest, bluetooth and wwan off and wireless on. I also use a wired usb mouse because the wireless usb mice use a little bit more power.

Although if my class that day dictates I run some VM's my battery life is severely impacted.

 

Thanks for the power consumption numbers. Loosing 2 hours of battery life is a lot.

Have you gotten an 802.11n connection to work? In my case I remember the driver saying that one of the antenna's was not connected and that I should connect it during first boot. Then I was only able to connect at 54Mbps from about 10m distance (I'll need to test it up close). The driver (12.4.0.0 32-Bit 4/9/2009) does recognize that my router supports both N and G modes, but there is no manual override to force an N connection. Finally while searching on ebay for a new antenna (tyco antenna for laptops) I've seen a couple of people advertise "unleash your N device's power" when selling a 3rd antenna. This is not "proof" and I still need to do more testing. If you can do an N connection with only 2 wires connected can you let me know what driver revision your using and how you initiate it vs. doing a G connection. Is there a cap on your 3rd antenna connector?

 

I haven't got an N connection yet... Don't have any other N wireless stuff so haven't been able to test it. I have no idea if my 3rd antenna connector has a cap on it, I'll take a look the next chance I get.

That battery life was with the SSD and dvd drive installed. With the 2.5" hdd installed my battery life doesn't suffer as long as the hdd is spun down. And of course this is all with everything optimized for battery life.

 

Just to clarify:
~12h battery life (9 cell battery) = 1.8 Samsung SSD and dvd drive installed
~10h battery life (9 cell battery) = 2.5" hdd and 1.8 Samsung SSD?

I'm looking at a single drive configuration and using an external USB drive or wireless connection if I need more space. With my desktop Airlink 802.11N card and a 130MBps connection I can watch 720p video.

I use my 2510p around the house with a 6 cell as a web reader and remote client and I'm happy with the battery life. Besides the performance improvements I'm hoping the SSD will cut down on my frequent hybernates to HDD. I'd like to just shutdown the machine and restart. I don't think 2GB (1 2GB DDR2 sodimm) hybernates will do a small SSDs wear performance (writing 6.25% of a 64gb drive several times a day) any good in the long term. I'll eventually switch to a dual boot configuration using Mobilin or another low footprint OS to cut down boot time for webbrowsing.

That is encouraging. I was worried that the PATA to SATA bridges didn't properly support HDD sleep modes. I need to read-up on SSD power consumption. If I recall right some desktop drives just leave the device powered on to optimize performance (can't imaging a dual Jmicron config is power efficient). Do you think the HDDs sleep mode is triggered by the HDD controller or triggered by the OS?

A little bit off topic, but can someone suggest a remedy for a noise 2510p fan? Mine started vibrating after a few months and is irritating. Is there some fan speed control SW out there? I'm a little bit hesitant to turn it completely off because when it is on the air coming from it is really hot. It's just funny since I typically am only browsing with it and it always turns on after a 30-1h of the 2510p being on. Has anyone tried underclocking their 2510p using setfsb or any other power saving techniques (e.g. force lower speedstep lock)?

 

just to clarify, my 2.5" hard drive is a pata model, I don't use a sata drive because of the power draw of the sata <-> pata bridge chip.

As for the fan I'd just get a replacement for it.

I wrote a small utility that quickly gives some stats about current power consumption and remaining battery life, I figure somebody might find useful.



From the left:
93% is percentage of battery remaining
12:41:53 is battery time remaining at the current power draw
13:38:20 is total battery time at current power draw
-5.9 is the current power draw from the battery in watts

Can be downloaded here: http://pocketgeek.pgnet.us/BatteryStatus.exe

 

been thinking about upgrading my 2510p with a ssd for a while now, the 4200rpm is just a killer on the performance. I guess the cheapest options (going with 1.8'') are Mtron Mobi 32gb and Photofast G-monster 32gb. What would be the best option? havent found that many reviews on the photofast ssd on the net.

Anyone here with a SSD from photofast ?

 

The Gmonster V3 is not out yet. The V1 and V2 are. Not sure what controllers they are using. Pricing of the Photofast drives are close to the Mtron. Though the Mtron currently has a maximum size of 32GB. A 64GB is supposed to come out later this year. Mtron is SLC while most other drives are MLC. One cheap option is to get a DVD drive caddy and add a 2.5 SATA SSD.

 

I cannot confirm that.

9, 12, 13, 18, 20, 24 are connected to GND (using your numbering).

 

Finally got around to downloading this. Nice app. What is the difference between the 2 and 3 value for battery time? Is the second value useful in 2 battery systems?

How did you get -5.9 power draw? Mine is running -14.2 watts (fan is running on low). I trying to underclock my system to see if this has any impact on the consumption.

 

the first time is remaining time, the other is total time. So in the example above I have 12 hours 41 minutes 53 seconds remaining, and if my battery was at 100% i'd have 13 hours, 38 minutes and 20 seconds.

As for power draw, what are your system specs?

 

I was able to underclock the fsb and processor down to:

CPUx9/CPUx6/FSB/DDR/PCIE-E/PCI
706.5/471/78.5/156.9/99.8/33.3
1200/800/133/266/99.8/33.3

78.5 was the lower limit in SetFSB. Sadly the power consumption on went down to -12.4 from -14.2 watts (15%). I can feel the system is slower (firefox rendering is slow).

Any suggestion on controlling the system fan speed?

 

Got it. How often are the values updated?

U7600 (1.2GHz running at 800MHz)
80GB 1.8 PATA drive
2GB DDR2 RAM
DVD-ROM installed but not running
4GB SD card installed
Viking Cardbus PCMCIA adapter
4965AGN wireless (running in G mode)
6 cell battery (darn I should have picked up those 9 cells when they were around $35 each.)
WinXP pro still running all the default crap that was pre-installed (~24% load with Firefox running)
LCD brightness at 75% (will try setting to 0%)
​

At 0% brightness I'm getting -9.7% consumption.

 

Try removing the above, reset bios, disable unneeded devices in bios, reboot, set 0% brightness, wifi on and report your power consumption.

pocket_geek has incredibly low power consumption, though there should really be a maximum of 0.3W difference between ZIF and his SSD (0.4W idle versus 0.1W idle between them). There are variations in U7600 power consumption too. I've read that they are just the better batch of Txxx cpus, running undervolted/underclocked to conserve power. I have seen 6.13 lows a couple of times with the ZIF drive XP/SP3, but then it jumps up and stays at ~8.4W. Haven't quite figured out what it is that causes the jump, though I have a rebuilt XP SP3 system (not HP XP build) with HP drivers manually applied and many of the latest drivers loaded via drivermax. Win7RC1 giving higher power consumption figures.

Also, are you running SP3? There was an issue with USB drivers holding the CPU in high load state. Worth checking by seeing how much time your system spends in C3 low power state. To add %C3 to perfmon in XP, just right click on the window and select Add Counters, then choose from the list and monitor. It should be > 90% during idle periods and power consumption should drop considerably.

 

yeah, 5.9 was the lowest I've ever got and it didn't stay there for long. Typically I'm between 6 and 7 watts when at idle, and of course it jumps quite a bit when I'm doing something..

This app updates every 5 seconds. I get the time from a windows API call so that should generally be the same that windows reports. As for the power usage I have to talk directly to the battery controller...what a PITA that was to figure out.

 

Removing the sd and cf pcmcia didn't help much. turning off wifi took me down to 6.7-6.3. Not really practical since I use WiFi a lot.

I recall seeing somewhere that you OC your CPU. How far do you push it and any negative side effects (e.g. heat, battery life, no noticable performance boost), Underclocking the CPU didn't really help much power consumption wise. I also had some graphics tearing (PCIe issue?) after a soft reboot. I shutdown the machine completely and after that the softOC was removed.

Yes the default HP XP config. It has a whole bunch of junk processes in it when I pull up my task manager. I'm waiting for my caddy before I install a fresh XP on an SSD. BTW, do you use drive guard, drive encryption, quick launch buttons, finger print sensor? My C3 low power state (is this the 6x speed step?) is 96 in average.

Thanks for your feedback and tips.

 

Do you use WiFi? What brightness settings are you using?

 

yup, wifi on. bluetooth off, bluetooth seems to use way more power than it should for me at least... brightness 4 notches from darkest

If you have Microsoft Office installed check to see if you have groovemonitor (or something like that) running, that'll suck up alot of power because it constantly poles your drives.