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    T520's or T420's with 6 Gbit/s SATA??

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by kaddy, Mar 21, 2011.

  1. kaddy

    kaddy Newbie

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    Can you anyone confirm that the T420 and T520's have 6 Gbit/s SATA?
     
  2. eiji-gravion

    eiji-gravion Notebook Enthusiast

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  3. kaddy

    kaddy Newbie

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    Thanks!

    Was hoping to get a vertex 3 and use it to it's potential. oh well
     
  4. erik

    erik modifier

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    those are drive speeds listed in the PSREF, not bus speeds.
     
  5. vēer

    vēer Notebook Deity

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    So , erik, yes or no?!

    If you know it, why not saying it :D
     
  6. kaddy

    kaddy Newbie

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    Can anyone confirm a yes or a no?
     
  7. orca3000

    orca3000 Notebook Evangelist

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    The new Intel chipset supports SATA III by default. There is not reason Lenovo would disable that. The new SATA III SSDs have barely reached market. The drives that are validated by Lenovo are still SATA II.
     
  8. talin

    talin Notebook Prophet

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    They throttled the T61/X61. Check out this thread here.
     
  9. eiji-gravion

    eiji-gravion Notebook Enthusiast

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    C300 ssds which are currently still the best overall ssds have been out for around 5 months now so not sure I'd call that "barely reaching the market".
     
  10. commander

    commander Notebook Consultant

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    I am waiting for W520, I hope they will support sata3. I have T60 now and they limited it to sata1 like Roger mentioned. I want to use Vertex3.

    T520 is out so I hope somebody will confirm this quickly.
     
  11. halobox

    halobox Notebook Deity

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    The Intel Series 510 was also out before the Sandy Bridge machines. Unless Intel and Lenovo have suddenly decided to get stupid I'm sure the new design supports the full speeds. If they don't, there is going to be huge fallout.
     
  12. erik

    erik modifier

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    to the best of my knowledge the new thinkpad systems support 6 Gbps.   i have not seen, heard, or read anything to make me think the contrary.

    those systems were "throttled" during the SATA/PATA transition.   now that everything is 100% SATA-based, there's no logical reason to cap anything.

    your T60 is limited to SATA 1.5 Gbps by the chipset.   no PM945/GM945-based system was ever capable of 3 Gbps.   3 Gbps support wasn't available until the PM965/GM965 chipsets.
     
  13. Tsunade_Hime

    Tsunade_Hime such bacon. wow

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    Well not like most modern drives even saturate SATA 1 speeds anyway.

    Besides with SATA 3, unless you are copying data left and right, 4k and random read/write are more important than sequential read/write.
     
  14. commander

    commander Notebook Consultant

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  15. talin

    talin Notebook Prophet

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    Very interesting review that commander linked. Specifically what they say here;

    It will be interesting to see if it's indeed throttled intentionally or not.
     
  16. eiji-gravion

    eiji-gravion Notebook Enthusiast

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    Almost any ssd will easily saturate sata 1 speed and almost any modern ssd will easily saturate sata 2 speed.

    Also, on sata 3 capable ssds even if you're not exceeding sata 1/2 speeds on sequential or random including 4k random read/write it can and almost always will increase when going from sata 2 to sata 3 so you really can't put it into such simplistic terms like that.
     
  17. chucksters

    chucksters Notebook Enthusiast

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    It appears the T520 does NOT, I'm still trying to get a reason. Placed an order with a Lenovo rep and asked him to triple-check it for me and he sent me this:

    "I just spoke with our Product Manager and he said that the 6 Gb/s would NOT be supported. I asked if we had modified anything, but he went offline before I could ask him anything else. He specifically said NO to our question though. I'll cancel your order if you like. Sorry for the confusion, this is what I was looking at to confirm though. " (Shows a screen cap of Intel's site listing SATA 6 Gb/s as an option)

    It seems people were able to mod the T61 BIOS to support the SATA II when it was supported but locked- any chance someone could mode the BIOS to support SATA III for the T520/420 line?
     
  18. pkincy

    pkincy Notebook Evangelist

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    This is one of the reasons I went with the W520.

    The other was USB 3.0.

    The other was quad core.

    Perry
     
  19. chucksters

    chucksters Notebook Enthusiast

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    Does the W520 support SATA 6 Gb/s? Also the T520 does have quad core.
     
  20. commander

    commander Notebook Consultant

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    Exactly, are you sure that it is sata 3?
     
  21. magic08

    magic08 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Any news on this? The new models like T420 are already shipped to many people, did anyone tested it?
     
  22. jpresto

    jpresto Newbie

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  23. shareef777

    shareef777 Newbie

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    Has this ever been verified yet? Looking to order a SSD and was wondering if I should upgrade to a SATA3 drive, or save some money and stick with a SATA2 one.
     
  24. John Ratsey

    John Ratsey Moderately inquisitive Super Moderator

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    SATA3 works fine and the Crucial M4s have competitive pricing.

    However, I see the main benefit of SSDs being the near-instant access times. The data throughput boost provided by SATA3 will only be noticeable when you are shifting large quantities of data.

    John
     
  25. PatchySan

    PatchySan Om Noms Kit Kat

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    Yes the T420 can run SATA 6GB/s mode, screencap taken from my T420 with Intel 510 SSD.

    [​IMG]