Ultrabay Slim SATA HDD Adapter
Ultrabay Slim SATA HDD AdapterThis is an adapter to connect an additional hard disk drive to the Ultrabay Slim. Features
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Part numbers
Marketing PN: 40Y8725 FRU PN: 26R9246
Linux support
The adapter contains a PATA to SATA bridge chip, which means that although the disk is SATA it connects as a PATA (IDE) device.
If connected at boot time, the drive is normally located at /dev/sdb
Supported with
- ThinkPad R60
- ThinkPad T60, T60p, T61
- ThinkPad Z60m, Z60t, Z61m, Z61p
- ThinkPad X60, X60s with UltraBase X6
- ThinkPad Advanced Dock
Unsupported use with
The adapter has a black plastic grommet at the back that restricts its use to the 60 series ThinkPads. Some people have successfully removed this grommet with a pair of channel lock pliers, or sliced it off with a Dremel after which it will fit into older ThinkPads like the T40 series. This works because the adapter actually bridges the SATA HDD to PATA as those older machines have no SATA support.
This has been tested with the following ThinkPads, although this is obviously not supported!
Poor performance with 3rd-party adapters
Many (most?) of the SATA adapters listed on eBay are 3rd-party clones, whose poor build quality limits them to UDMA/33 speeds. They are therefore slower than the common IDE adapters, and especially unsuitable for SSD use.
A kernel log showing such an adapter being limited to UDMA/33:
[ 55.610787] ata2.00: ATA-7: FUJITSU MHV2020BH, 0093002C, max UDMA/100 [ 55.610793] ata2.00: 39070080 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32) [ 55.610801] ata2.00: limited to UDMA/33 due to 40-wire cable [ 55.650666] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/33 [ 55.650676] ata2: EH complete
