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
- other P/N: 26R9247
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
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!
Kernel Issues with 3rd-party adapters
Many (most?) of the SATA adapters listed on eBay are 3rd-party clones, and the kernel will often limit them to UDMA/33 speeds, with a maximum of 33.3 MB/s. They are thereby rendered slower than the common IDE adapters.
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
However, this problem can possibly be overcome by adding the boot parameter libata.force=X:80c (where X is the IDE line which is being affected by this UDMA problem).
A kernel log after using the libata.force=X:80c bootparm:
[ 1863.865187] ata2: ACPI event [ 1865.191117] ata2: soft resetting link [ 1865.345444] ata2: FORCE: cable set to 80c [ 1865.345729] ata2.00: ATA-7: TOSHIBA MK6034GSX, AH101A, max UDMA/100 [ 1865.345741] ata2.00: 117210240 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32) [ 1865.349602] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/100 [ 1865.349629] ata2: EH complete
NOTE: Using libata.force=X:80c is oft referred to as a "work-around"--the better solution would be to patch the kernel, e.g., Ubuntu Bug #195221. Then again, this problem has been around at least since January of 2008....
