Is the Lenovo ThinkPad W500 SATA 300 speed?

re: Is the Lenovo ThinkPad W500 SATA 300 speed?

Steve Sinchak — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:05:16 GMT

Lenovo limited the SATA interface on most of their notebooks to just SATA150 to "save battery life". Even if the interface supported SATA II 3Gbps it is limited to just SATA I 1.5 Gbps. A stupid decision if you ask me. And there is no bios setting to remove the limitation.

Wouldn't the limiting factor be the hard drive?

bluvg — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:12:25 GMT

For a single drive, it's nowhere near saturating even the SATA 150 interface, except when the data is cached (which wouldn't affect a 39 GB copy test). Or maybe I misunderstood your test....

re: Is the Lenovo ThinkPad W500 SATA 300 speed?

Matthew Kohut — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:01:58 GMT

Keith -- saw your incoming link. I actually don't have an answer yet, but I did ask our team of engineers to try and find an answer. They haven't gotten back to me yet. I hope to have an answer because 1. it's needed ,and 2. because I have a vested interest in it.

re: Is the Lenovo ThinkPad W500 SATA 300 speed?

Keith Combs — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:15:39 GMT

Thanks Matt. If you hear back let me know. I have to return my W500 eval unit so I won't be able to test any fixes.

I do however have a whole group of friends over here that just received W500's and will be running Hyper-V virtualization with Windows Server 2008 x64 and Windows 7. They will be very interested in a fix.

And when we ascertain it is fixed, I will certainly update this post with that information.

Keith Combs

re: Is the Lenovo ThinkPad W500 SATA 300 speed?

Uvizion — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 07:43:17 GMT

If I understand your test correctly, the problem comes from your HDD. The max. performance of the HDD will never reach the SATA 150 and hence in both case T61p and W500 will have the same result.

re: Is the Lenovo ThinkPad W500 SATA 300 speed?

mark — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 04:25:41 GMT

Exactly. A typical, consumer-grade, hard drive will average about 50-75 mb/sec or so... you'd need to stripe a couple drives (raid 0) to approach 150 mb/sec. Stripe about 5 drives to get over 300 mb/sec.

re: Is the Lenovo ThinkPad W500 SATA 300 speed?

Keith Combs — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 04:43:40 GMT

Exactly? By that logic I would not see any difference in using eSATA and USB.

re: Is the Lenovo ThinkPad W500 SATA 300 speed?

Ryan — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 16:59:29 GMT

Consumer SSDs are available with speeds of 250MBps. SATA-I performance is not adequate.

Thinkpads advertise SATA II performance, but they don't provide it.

Thinkpad owners are finding their SSD performance cut in half by Lenovo's make-believe SATA II.

This a real problem. Lenovo needs to fix it.

re: Is the Lenovo ThinkPad W500 SATA 300 speed?

Keith Combs — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 18:25:32 GMT

If it's a hardware problem (motherboard), that's going to be a really expensive fix. I hope this is a driver or BIOS fix for their sake.

re: Is the Lenovo ThinkPad W500 SATA 300 speed?

Ryan — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:21:27 GMT

Lenovo has issued an official statement.

Certain Thinkpads advertised as SATA300 are actually limited to SATA150. But Lenovo does not plan to fix the issue. Meanwhile they continue to advertise SATA300 support for the affected models.

http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=T_Series_Thinkpads&thread.id=28641&view=by_date_ascending&page=6