I was surprised to find the other day that apparently I have a SATA controller on my Thinkpad T43 model 2668-8AG.According to lspci (under Linux): 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FBM (ICH6M) SATA Controller (rev 03) Could I really put a SATA drive in this machine? If so, would the usual restriction apply? (I mean, the annoying but not disabling message that tells me the drive in use is not on the approved list.) I have 3 T43's (or 4, if one dead one is included), and this is the first one that says it has a SATA controller.
The T43 series is a royal pain. It has a chipset with SATA but for some reason IBM/Lenovo decided to use a SATA-PATA bridge and PATA devices. This is why there are restrictions on hard drives in the later BIOS revisions, etc. My guess is they decided to certify certain PATA drives as working correctly with the translation done in the bridge and they didn't wish to deal with drives that didn't work quite correctly. I have a T43p - I managed to get one of the 100 GB 7200 RPM drives that has the "good" bios and it still works (knock on wood :-) ) Stuart OT - I have had experience with various drives that didn't work correctly. The firmware in the drives had problems. For example, an extremely expensive SCSI drive ($3000 many years ago) would not work correctly as a boot drive in a high end Sun workstation but would work OK as a data drive. Sun hadn't certified the drive and the firmware wasn't correct. Various other drives (again SCSI) didn't correctly do command queueing - you could turn that off in the controller setup but it killed performance as a server. Sun burned new firmware into those Seagate and IBM drives and that would fix the errors (you also got to pay for it if you purchased the "good" drives from Sun - they cost about double). _______________________________________________ Thinkpad mailing list [email protected] http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
