T61p hard drive upgrade questions

I recently picked up a T61P (model 6459-CTO) on eBay. It appears to have been restored to its factory-shipped state running XP on a 160 GB hard drive. I just bought a Seagate Momentus 750GB 7200RPM SATA/300 drive to swap in before doing a clean install of Windows 7 64-bit. (This is for my son, who is studying engineering & industrial design in college, so he uses some fairly demanding applications.)

Questions:

• Do the arguments in favor of flashing the Middleton BIOS to the T61p (for the sake of removing the 1.5 GB/sec interface speed cap) apply to a Seagate Momuntus 750GB 7200RPM SATA/300? (All discussion I've found in relation to the Middleton mod and Lenovo's 1.5 GB/sec cap has been in response to questions about upgrading to SSDs.)

• Do the potential benefits, if any, of flashing the Middleton BIOS on this machine for this HD upgrade trump the risks, if any?

•Has Lenovo posted an updated BIOS that satisfactory addresses the issue? (I saw a post that suggested this is the case.)

• Although I went to Microcenter intending to buy a WD Scorpio Black HD, I took away the Seagate instead based on a $30 price difference (the Seagate was on sale for $89). Would user experience in this forum argue that superior reliability of the WD warrants paying the difference?

• While I'm at this, should I consider doing something else, e.g., installing a SSD and supplementing capacity with a second HD in the UltraBay? (If so, what might be the optimal combination to end up with 600-750+ GB total storage?)

BTW, while I'm not completely ignorant, I'm also not a techie, and much of what I've read getting to this poing went over my head.

I also posted this on the Lenovo Community site and had a couple of very helpful responses there, but thought I'd ask here as well.

Thanks in advance

 

Lenovo is not going to address this as the T61 is four years old now. If you're using a platter based drive it's a non-issue as no platter based drives can exceed SATA I speeds.

I guess whether you want to spend the money for a SSD for the main bay is probably a personal preference. You can do the BIOS hack if you like, but the biggest benefit of SSD is the near instantaneous seek times, which will not be effected by the SATA I cap. Only stuff that puts a heavy load on the controller like copy and pasting will be throttled by the slower controller. My R60e, which is a SATA I machine and has a crappy 16GB, absolutely flies running Linux, faster than my X220i with a better SATA II drive.

 

Thanks for the reply. I wasn't expecting any response from Lenovo, but thought some users in that community might offer opinions. The biggest reason for replacing the hard drive (nothing wrong with the old one) is to increase capacity. Which leads to the question whether there might be any benefit derived from flashing the Middleton-modded BIOS onto the thing in order to remove the 1.5GB/sec interface speed limit that I'd learned about while researching replacement drives in this forum. Almost all of that discussion related to upgrading to SSDs (including in T61s), so I wondered if the any performance increase I might reasonably expect would outweigh the risks. (Answer I've gathered so far is probably not.)

Reason for upgrading the RAM is advantage of running on 4GB with Windows 7 64-bit, and for the price the DDR2 800 seemed the way to go.

I don't think SSD is worth the money for me.

Thanks again for the reply.

 

Are the applications your son intends to use I/O bound or do they bottleneck on CPU or GPU?

There aren't many apps that are really I/O bound so the current config might be perfectly adequate. I wouldn't throw any money at the problem until you really know.

 

Just for your reference, I installed a Crucial M4 in T60p running at SATA I speed and I am more than happy about it.

 

I'm not sure. He probably doesn't either. What he runs for school (which is what I'm willing to subsidize) includes Adobe apps (PhotoShop and Illustrator), MS Office apps, and some CAD programs from autodesk. I asked which and he named 3DS Max and Inventor, adding that he would soon be learnin Maya. He said some of the file sizes can get pretty large. I know that's relative. I don't know in absolute terms. Does that tell you anything useful?

He currently has a huge HP that I bought for him -- let him pick it out -- when he started college. Probably good for watching movies. It's seems flimsy to me and is acting sick. I've had a T61p (same model). Commute to an out-of-state job with it and have traveled heavily with it. I got his a couple of weeks ago on eBay for $350. I'm not interested in sinking every dollar I might to max out it's performance. I just want to do what makes good sense on a value basis. What drove the decision to replace the drive was capacity. Then the question becomes, OK, what replacement drive? That turned out to be a slippery, if interesting, slope. It also started me to think about what I might do with my own. But that's not a priority. I need to get his done. I'm sure he'd love an SSD, but my impression is he doesn't need it (would probably most notice it during boot) and doing all I might do (e.g., flashing modded BIOS) to extract performance would be a the risk of downtime and headaches.

Thanks for the reply.

 

The Seagate Momentus XT might be worth a look. It's a platter based drive with a 4GB flash drive attached. It can give near SSD performance while offering up to 500GB of storage.

 

Thanks. Did you consider the modded BIOS? If so, why did you decide against it?

 

T60p uses different chipset than T61, so it is limited to SATA I on birth.

 

Thanks, I did (give it a look -- a long one). What I was told by the guy helping me at Microcenter was that while it might improve boot speed, there could be a tradeoff in latency writing back and forth with files >4GB (or something like that). I've also several reviews reporting a similar experience (i.e., apparent pattern) of great inital results following by freezes, lags, etc. It was pretty tempthing, but reliability trumps enhanced performance. The performance improvement offered by SSD might cross the tipping point for me if it weren't for the added cost factor. And my impression is that while some have had great experience with SSD in T61s, mileage varies. My objective is to configure a solid, fast, and reliable workhorse for a sensible price.

It's a little tempting to hotrod my own, but I can't affort to risk the downtime.

 

Thanks. I hadn't caught that it was a T60. I remember reading that.

 

On my T61p I had a variety of (WD+seagate+hitachi) magnetic discs in both main bay and ultrabay as well as an intel x25m SSD.