T60/T60p/T61 ultrabay slim sata adapter

This is a comment to the closed thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=251377

This adapter actually connects a SATA drive as a PATA drive, see http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/UltraBay_Slim_SATA_HDD_Adapter
See the notes about removing the grommet to make it work in T40's etc.

It is very useful for the Advanced Dock, since the slot in this dock is 12.5mm high and consequently accepts the new Western Digital 750GB and 1TB 2.5in drives. Did have some initial problems getting Win XP SP3 to recognize the full size of the 750GB drive - initially reported it as 335GB. However, after booting a standalone system on CD and using WD tools to erase first and last 1 million sectors, followed by defining a partition with Partition Magic 8.01 as NTFS with no drive letter, Win XP recognized it correctly as 698GB.

 

nice... thanks for sharing it with us.

 

I have this adapter, which would probably work with the advanced dock as well. I use it to keep a backup of my backups. Yes, I'm paranoid. The nice thing about it is it's 12.7mm design. There's no gap like when using the Ultrabay from the T series. I think it was made with the R5x models in mind as the bezel isn't quite flush, but it works fine. I thought about picking up the 1TB drive as I'm sure it would fit, but they're still too pricey right now.

 

there are R series ultrabay adapters but they are aftermarket products mostly, i got one from China for around 10 USD.

The ultrabay hdd adapter for the new Txxx, Wxxx, Rxxx are all serial ata port now not the old Pata port of the old, which is nice in terms of having full SATA2 support, but it makes all the old parts from previous generation of thinkpads redundant.

 

This item from ebay is actually a fake one. But not if that matters too much for that price.

 

I don't know that they ever said it was a genuine part. Regardless it works fine.

 

Can anyone volunteer to post performance figures of a HDD using the native primary sata connector versus used in the Ultrabay caddy? This uses the Marvell sata-to-pata bridge chip. Here's Passmark's Performancetest benchmarks for the newmodeus sata-to-pata chip which uses the Jmicron chip. Two different systems were used, similar speeds, but the 2510P using the sata-to-pata s ees only 54% of the performance of native sata. Exactly the same harddisk moved from one system to the other. Crystaldiskmark doesn't reflect such a disparity but "feel" between systems certainly does.