Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
I have a problem with my Panasonic Toughbook CF-F8GWQCJR laptop which has an ICH9M-E SATA controller.
I recently installed a SATA-II 3.0Gb/s capable SSD drive which is capable of speeds of up to 280Mb/s which has been proven on another laptop, but on the Toughbook it reads at no more than 145Mb/s even though it runs in AHCI mode. Further investigation revealed that it runs in SATA mode 1
There are no jumpers on the drive and no settings in the BIOS that relate to AHCI or SATA mode. I have updated the BIOS to the latest version from panasonic website but still that does not allow any changes to the AHCI or SATA mode.
Installing another, SATA 2 capable HDD also resulted in it running in SATA 1 mode. The interesting thing is, I know for sure that ICH9M-E supports SATA 2, I have another laptop with it where SATA 2 works just fine.
So my question is - is there a way to make the SSD work on a Toughbook F8 at SATA II speeds?
Thanks
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Check your PM's. Hope this helps
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This is a problem or shall I say "Issue" is becoming more and more talked about on various forums. More people are starting to install SSD's and are realizing that there laptop's are throttled back without ever knowing about it. This is what I have found so far after some exhaustive reading and testing.
After I 1st realized that my CF-30 MK2 and 3 were running SATA 1 I was really pissed to say the least. I have spent some good money on various SSD's. I sent Panasonic an email and was 1st told that I was crazy and didn't know what I was talking about basically. Well, I didn't accept that too well since I knew what I was talking about and figured the support guys just did not get this issue very often. I asked them to have a manager call me to discuss this issue. Low and behold the national support manager called me the next day. He was extremely nice and very educational. Long story short, they throttled/lowered power to keep the heat in check since we do not have fans to extract the heat. he did tell me that the CF-52, which he used at the time, was his suggestion if I wanted desktop performance within the Toughbook line. He said it was the most powerful laptop they have ever made. I thanked him for his time and that was that. Later that week I received a UPS package with about $200.00 bucks worth of Toughbook goodies Let's see HP or Dell do something like that
Here is where I am now. On my MK2 I have the Intel 80GB G2 SSD. I did alot of tweaking with this one to see if I could bump it up some. I did bump it up to where it runs faster than my MK3 and 31. Here is kicker though.... I don't remember what I did! I know it was in a tweak from this thread though.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...-intel-series-4-5-965-chipsets-jjb-tweak.html
Read this thread all the way thru. I did try to apply this on my MK3 and could not get it to work as well.
I will say this though. On my MK3 I have a Samsung 470 256GB installed and I can't really tell a huge difference between the 2. One thing you have to remember is the 4K speeds are what the OS really thrives on. How often are you reading or writing to the drive where you actually would use the huge read and write numbers? It's the lower 4K reading that you want.
Can you post a pic of a benchmark and let me see what you are getting? Forgot to mention; Panasonic has done something to the BIOS that changed the power settings. I know for a fact they did something to the power settings. -
Here are a couple of my benchmarks for your comparison.
Attached Files:
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Here is my CF-52MK1 Intel 320 / 120gb. Not sure if this is good or not
Attached Files:
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I would of done my 30 but just took out the SSD and put the OEM drive back in . Thinking about moving up to a mk2
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I have been looking at a few
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I'm looking at this thread through a set of beer goggles, so it sounds great news.
Exactly what it is that some of you are trying to achieve.
Are you looking at the "Glossy Brochure BS" of Sata III Sequential Reads of 500MB/s & trying to obtain the same performance figures on a notebook that's the same size & weight as a paving slab??
If you take the 4K read & write figures as being a good indication of "Real World" performance, then you should find that a good quality Sata I SSD blows the sock's off a Sata III mechanical HDD with respect to data transfer speeds.
Added to which, the access times of 0.1-0.2ms against 16ms gives lightening fast performance. You obtain this without creating overheating issues, I/O errors with an acceptable battery life.
If you look hard enough & long enough then YES, you'll find one, but as it stands at the moment we've got the worlds most reliable notebook's, that is, until you find or develop your hack.
Now for a question; are my beer goggles helping me to see straight ??
o.g. << you can never get too much of a good thing >> -
You know... I've been reading the forum and thinking back on the several threads on this subject, and I suspect I know why Panasonic deliberately throttled back the bus speed here, and you probably aren't going to like it.
Heat management. Just bear with me.
Panasonic actually took a fair bit of heat with earlier models of Toughbooks and brick PCs by throttling back the CPU clock to reduce heat generated, especially in passive-cooled designs. Smart people know underclocking is a good idea; dumb people think they're somehow getting cheated. Well, what if there was a way to slow down EVERYTHING without taking the PR hit of underclocking the CPU again?
With Windows-powered machines, there is. Because of the way it manages virtual memory, EVERYTHING the computer does follows the timetable of a single point - the data bus of the HDD. Slow that down, and the CPU gets a bunch more idle cycles, the RAM and video do too. Now I suspect that with the limitations of the PATA HDD bus that wasn't much of a problem; though I do seem to remember some talk, even back with the CF-29s, of people being frustrated with their shiny new SSDs because of Panny using an ATA-166 capable controller and throttling it back to ATA-100 or ATA-66 speeds. The IDE standard was always the bottleneck on any machine that suffered with it, especially on later 3GHz P4 powered and similar era machines of any manufacturer. In desktops, we run RAIDs to eliminate this bottleneck; in a laptop, it suddenly becomes a brick wall to beat your head against, unless you WANT to slow down a machine exponentially.
Now... a few years later, and the standard is SATA. Gotta use SATA, cuz the chipsets don't support IDE anymore and nobody's gonna buy your machine if it still uses PATA, as SATA has been the standard long enough even dumb@sses know IDE is old stuff. But SATA can actually handle the speeds that your new processor operates at, so you don't have the natural governor of that bus working in your favor anymore. So... you throttle back the SATA bus to the slowest speed, and presto. Your CPU gets to rest, your video gets to rest, everything stays nice & frosty even under the desert sun and only a few freaks like Alex and Toyo who bother to put an SSD in a laptop whose daddy was a bulldozer and expect it to go fast would ever notice.
Does any of this sound even a little bit like a design of a company motivated by business as a major Defense Industry manufacturer?
mnem
Cynicism - Just one more service we offer. -
Crap-A-Mundo, have you seen Alex's avatar, looks like that cat has been drinking the same stuff I've been on.
The beer goggles are off, I've popped a couple of paracetamol's, so I'm looking at this thread in a different light.
For those that do not share the same entrepreneurial vision or business acumen of the OP, consider this;
You are travelling through "Ice Road Trucker Territory", it's the type of environment than can & does kill people. The ambient temperature is minus 47, at that level, it makes little difference if it's Celsius or Fahrenheit. You need to be carrying the type of kit that is purposely intended for use in a hostile environment, hence your toughie.
Your "Hack" enables CPU overclocking to the extent that you can cook a "Full English Breakfast" on the bottom case after three minutes of operation, good thinking OP, most of the things in life we take for granted were the "Brain Child" of people we perceived to be "Mad Scientists".
When it saves someones life you'll get the credit, where credit is due.
o.g. << are the pills working>> -
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CF problems limiting SSD speeds to SATA I -?
Discussion in 'Panasonic' started by listerdl, Oct 22, 2011.
