SATA 6 Gbps - the official word

matt kohut just blogged about what's been on everyone's minds: SATA 6 Gbps support on huron river thinkpads.

Inside the Box SATA 3.0 600MB/s on ThinkPad Notebooks

consider this official.

 

do any of the mSATA drives support 6gbps? either google isnt helping or my google-fu is not very strong

what are the best sata III devices right now? traditional spinning drives, regular size ssds, mini ssds, etc.

 

Read the link. It has the answer.

 

nvm. i misread. msata interface itself isnt capable of 6.0gbps

do sata III drives have higher power consumption than sata II drives? how much higher?

sorry. i've been googling and reading but its hard to find a straightforward answer.

 

mSATA only supports up to 3.0Gb/s transfer rates. See http://www.serialata.org/documents/mSATA-press release-v9.pdf

 

^thanks for the link

 

The press release says what it does support. It doesn't say it will never support SATA III 6GB speeds.

The glass is half full.

 

it seems like none of the sata 6gbps ssds available (m4, c300, vertex3, 510) are 7mm in height?

i'm not sure about the rest but the 510 apparently doesnt have a spacer you can get rid of and I think the c300 has the spacer, but if you get rid of it you break the warranty as the sticker covers the spacer

i guess the only option is like the article said to put a 6bps ssd in the ultrabay?

looking at reviews sata III devices have almost twice the power consumption during various situations of sata II devices.

i guess im going to stick with a 7200 rpm hard drive and a intel 310

 

We can but hope

 

Power consumption is partially dictated by the controller used. Marvell and SandForce tend to have higher power consumption as they offer higher performance.

Sometimes the speed of the drive doesn't make a significant difference unless you plan on copying data 24/7. I personally am going for Intel SSDs for all my future SSD purchases as time and time again have shown they are the most reliable.

 

Wonder if ultrabay hdd adapter works with SATA3.0 as I would think the interface on that would need an update?

 

This isn't good. I checked, and apparently I have a B2-rev motherboard:

"W520 with B2 stepping QM67 chips - HDD/DVD/mSATA effected?"
W520 with B2 stepping QM67 chips - HDD/DVD/mSATA e... - Lenovo Community

 

yes.   this is quoted from the blog:

 

Glad I took the gamble and got a Vertex 3. I was so close to going Intel, but the techy inside me just couldn't look at those benchmarks then buy a slower performing drive for the same price.

Here's to hoping I don't get one of the 2%!

 

I didnt think anyone would sell B2 motherboards especially so late after the announcing of the bug

 

But I talked about old adapters, as sata3.0 has a new plug so I guess you need new ultrabay adapters for it to work.

 

Something is seriously wrong with this picture:

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"600 MB/s"? "600 speed"? "SATA 600"? "SATA 600 capable"? If the blog is considered "official" (erik), what is Matt Kohut referring to? I thought the proper nomenclature was "SATA 6Gb/s." According to the Serial ATA International Organization:

​

 

SATA still has the same socket regardless of being revision I, II, or III.   the thinkpad drive adapters changed when the connection sockets went from EIDE to mini-SATA but the adapter compatible with the T400/T500/W500 and newer will drive SATA 6 Gbps without a problem.

this is the adapter you need: Lenovo Support - ThinkPad Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter III - Overview

it was introduced Q2'09 and is compatible with all current SATA 6 Gbps systems.

considering how many people on this forum say "SATA 3" or "SATA III" (both of which are incorrect), i stopped tilting at that windmill long ago.

if you want to correct matt over this detail, post on his blog.

 

600 MB/s is factually correct since about 10 bits are used to code one byte (error correction and protocol overhead). But I agree that its not the official nomenclature.

Once everyone calls it SATA 6Gb/s we can proceed with the next phase, where people will stop confusing mSATA and Micro SATA

 

Micro SATA is the connector on the 1.8" drives?

 

i fully expected this kind of official comeback. and i did post on his blog, officially.

 

If you can de-shell a 9.5mm SSD and wrap it in cellophane for protection then it would fit. Most SSDs internally are quite a bit thinner than their 9.5mm housing. Could be a warranty voiding exercise of the manufacturer has voiding-stickers set to detect removing the cover.

 

correct, not to be confused with the mini-SATA connector found on optical drives.   why "mini" SATA is smaller than "micro" SATA is beyond me.   i'm sure "nano" SATA will be even larger.

officially or unofficially, i'm not in charge of the synaptic firing pattern inside matt's gray matter.   don't shoot the messenger here.

unless the cellophane is specifically constructed with ESD properties, this would be a poor choice of material to wrap a circuit board.   the board would be better left uncovered than wrapped in standard plastic.

personally, i'll take a reliable SSD with a factory warranty over the fastest synthetic benchmark and no warranty.   it probably won't take long for all manufacturers to shift to 7mm.   they'd miss an opportunity otherwise.

 

I wish someone would sticky one of these threads. I posted screenshots of an ocz vertex 3 in my t520 with 500+ read/write speeds.

 

done.   i'll leave it up for a little while so members can see it.

 

Thanks erik!

 

Yeah there's a lot of confusion going around. But basically there's three classes of nomenclature:
Revision
Actual speed (bytes)
Link Speed including overhead (bits)

So there's basically three names for one thing:
Revision:.....Actual speed:..Link speed:
SATA I.......150 MB/s.........1.5 Gbit/s
SATA II......300 MB/s.........3.0 Gbit/s
SATA III.....600 MB/s.........6.0 Gbit/s

So any of this nomenclature is considered correct, but it is confusing.

 

I've translated BSian to English and this is what I got:

We've added SATA III even though there's absolutely no benefit with current SSD hardware because if we didn't you would cry on our boards and/or not buy the product otherwise

 

pretty much.

although, i'm sure someone would find something else to complain about.   they always do.

 

Well let's hope it's true. I'm not calling the author a liar, but until I see real world indications that they are indeed SATA III, I'll remain skeptical. But if it is true, it's very good news.

 

It's true. I have a vertex 3 in the main drive bay of my T420 with read/write speeds of nearly 500 MB/s

By the way, it was a bit of a pain to get it all set up and working right. First you need to load the AHCI drivers during windows installation, then you need to turn off queuing and change some iaStor registry values to prevent random minute long lockups. After getting all that fixed, the drive has been pretty amazing.

 

I have a Vertex 3 on order.
Do you have instructions on how to:
- load the AHCI drivers during windows installation
- turn off queuing
- change some iaStor registry values to prevent random minute long lockups

 

You need to extract the following intel rapid storage driver to a usb device. If you're installing windows x64:
Lenovo Support - Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver Windows 7 (64-bit), Vista (64-bit) and XP (64-bit) - ThinkPad

or windows x86 (32 bit):
Lenovo Support - Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver Windows 7 (32-bit), Vista (32-bit) and XP (32-bit) - ThinkPad


When you have the usb storage device with the drivers, press f1 when booting and change the bios sata setting to AHCI. Mine was defaulted to "Compatibility", then start windows installation. Choose the custom option and when you're at the partition manager, select Load and navigate to the usb device and load the drivers. Windows will then install and boot without blue screens.

To stop the freezing, I did two things. First, go to device manager and right click the vertex 3 device under disk drives > properties > policies > uncheck enable write caching

Then run the attached registry file to import the iaStor keys.

 

Were you experiencing hang ups before installing the iastor key? I know that this was an issue with vista but am wondering if it's still an issue with windows 7?

 

I was. Up until the 25th, the OS would lock up and I would get the following error in the system event log every few hours. Hasn't happened since I made the changes and I use it about 10 hours a day:

"The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period."

 

jschwartzbeck just wondering, did you experience a slight pause in the BIOS when you restart your T420 with the SSD in (with Intel RST drivers + UEFI Mode). Just trying to conclude whether its the RST drivers or my Intel 510 SSD thats causing the slight pause on the BIOS during restart.

 

Well it won't be the driver. Drivers are loaded when Windows loads, and that's after BIOS finishes posting. So none of what the above has been posted applies to your BIOS pause

Check your BIOS settings and change the boot order to ONLY include your hard drive. Remove any network booting, DVD ROM booting, etc. I don't have a thinkpad with me to guide you through exactly where to go to in the BIOS to get to that so you'll have to figure it out yourself.

If that doesn't help, replace the SSD with another drive and see if the same pause exists. If it doesn't, it's the SSD. If it does, either it's normal or something with your BIOS settings

 

OK thanks, I pretty much already went through the BIOS and prioritised the boot drive. Just tested the T420 with an OCZ Vertex II SSD instead and no long pause on the BIOS while restarting - it just flies. Switched back to the Intel 510 and while cold booting is fine its hangs a bit on the restart which is frustrating. Guess I have to wait for some firmware updates for it as there's nothing I can really do at this stage...

*UPDATE* Eeerily other people with the Intel 510 SSD are having similar problems on their ThinkPads during the restart phase, this time on a W520. Makes me wonder now if this really is a BIOS issue or SSD related...

Lenovo Forums - Restart Quirky with W520 and Intel 510 SSD

StorageReview - Lenovo W520 and Intel 510 SSD Warm Reboot Issue

 

Any news if Lenovo provided some driver updates that make using a Vertex 3 SSD even easier to use - hence no need to tweak some registry values or add additional drivers etc.

 

They won't do that. It's a Windows/OCZ issue, not Lenovo's problem. Kind of like asking them if Lenovo will fix world hunger

 

I'm using Vertex 3 with my W520. I have write caching on, and I am not experiencing any problems, fyi.

 

Do you also have SATA-3 performance?

 

Is there a tool that everyone is using to check or one that does performance stats? I have an Intel 510 Series SSD in my X220 (i7) and CrystalDiskInfo tells me I'm running Sata/600.

 

There are a few mentioned on th OCZ Website.

 

Why would you do this? I thought Windows 7 has an AHCI driver included. That's good enough to install the OS in AHCI mode. If you later want to change to a vendor provided AHCI driver you can do this via device manager. No?

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-77353.html

 

Intel Rapid Storage Technology > Manage > Advanced
will give you SATA transfer rate and other info.

CrystalDiskMark and PCMarkVantage will give you performance benchmarks

 

You have intel 510 in your X220 (really 510...) ??? I thought this SSD was 9.5mm and would not fit since the X220 is made for 7mm drives... Even in the dedicated thread on compatible drive in the X220, noone could tell me whether the 510 fits though some have installed 9.3mm drives (with some modifications). If you have some time, could you post pics of your install or explain how you did it? Just removed the rails and installed the SSD in the bay? No issue with overheating?

Thanks

EDIT: found your post on the other thread with all the required info. Thanks!