T61P Questions

I am looking to buy a T61P and have a few questions about it. First, should I really worry whether to get a SATA3.0GBs hard drive or SATA1.5Gb/s hard drive? Will I notice a big performance change? Next, does the T61P use the SATA3.0Gb/s type of hard drives or does it use the SATA1.5Gb/s hard drives? My last question is whether this laptop ships with Vista Home Premium 32+bit installed or the 64+bit version?

 

1: Not really, stick with any 7200 rpm drive choice, and you will be fine.

You can configure with 32 bit versions of XP Pro, Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, or Ultimate, and 64 bit versions of Business and Ultimate.

 

Alright, so a SATA1.5Gb/s 160GB drive with a 16mb cache will be better than a SATA3.0Gb/s 160GB drive with a 8mb cache? Comparing the Hitachi 1.5Gb/s to the Seagate SATA3.0Gb/s drive, the Hitachi seems to be the better buy for $5 less.

 

I wish someone who knows the interface would answer this. I was told that 1.5 Gb/s SATAI would competely saturate the SATA controller/bus of a Tpad, and more was gained from the 16 mb cache. There are very few controllers available (most on high-end servers) that can handle 3 Gb/s SATAII. Or so I was told - is this correct?? Anybody out there know?

 

Ooh, yes, now with this info on me, I would like to know even more. Does this only apply to a ThinkPad, or does it apply to other laptops? The more information the better!

 

AFAIK the Hitachi 7K200 is the fastest mechanical laptop drive, just edging out the new Seagate 7200.200 (sp.) even though the Hitachi's interface speed is only supposed to be SATA 1.5. There are threads around here about that type of thing. I doubt that either drive will last for ever, or be a bad choice.

I had a 7K100 in my T61P, I swapped it out for a 7k200, and found that the HDD performance was better than with my desktop computer, which does not speak well for my desktop computer. I did notice the difference, which on paper is about 22%. The 7k200 has a larger cache, which I believe also helps cure the lowest read issue that the 7k100 has.

With a dual-core laptop, the bottleneck always seems to be the hard drive. I can copy files with 8-10% processor usage.

I can't say this as fact but I can render this as opinion: Lenovo is out of their minds, asking for as much as they do for the 7K200, a doubling in price.

 

Queuing architectures for Sata is not as good as SCSI. Sata does not manage large numbers of queued packets as fast as Scsi does. But it's a non-issue because good software is not written in such a way that it's going to saturate a sata drive.

The I/O subsystem in thinkpads oi excellent. My desktop has the high performance 15k RPM scsi server disks and actually my T61p doesn't measure to be as fast but.... the user experience on my t61p is every bit as good as my desktop... I am ashamed to admit.

 

Yeah - good point. Probably the only software that intentionally saturates the interface is a disk benchmarking program, which is why you get a difference in benchmarks, but don't notice it in real world apps.

 

Hi bsodder,

There is one application where it does make a difference which is servers and multiuser systems which is why they use scsi. But you won't see differences due to queueing differentials on a laptop.

 

Alright, thank you for clearing up my hard drive questions about notebooks, and the T61P to be sepcific. All of you guys will be getting rep. points.