Talk:Ultrabay Slim SATA HDD Adapter

We've successfully used this adapter with older "incompatible" ThinkPads including T40 models.

There is a physical restrictor which is just a piece of flimsy plastic which acts as a protruding nub and prevents the SATA adapter from fully seating in older T4 systems.

That plastic nub can be cut, sawed or just snapped off with a decent grip and average size of pliers and it will fully seat into a T4 series ultrabay and recognize the drive.

As far as compatibility or voltage issues, we had the same fears but so far we've never experienced any issues of compatibility or damage to Toshiba, Fujitsu and Western Digital drives when used inside the SATA Adapter and various T41 - T43's including T43p.

We have successfully booted all of the "incompatible" systems from the adapter and whatever SATA drive inside and this enables us to swap the boot disk from a z60 into an older T40 and XP will run fine after you install the drivers:

TIP: If you need to boot an older "incompatible" system from a SATA boot disk from a newer system:

1. Setup the older "incompatible" T4x system to boot from the SATA ultraSlim HDD 2. Leave the T4x existing IDE HDD inside the standard slot 3. Boot and logon to the SATA build 4. You will be assaulted with "New Hardware Found" prompts, when prompted for the drivers point the Device Manager Wizards to the IDE drive c:\windows\inf directory for Windows to discover the necessary driver descriptors, some devices especially modems and GPU's will manually entering the older IDE directory of c:\windows\system32\drivers for sys files and c:\windows\system32 for some dll's. 5. You may need to reboot to realize full video compatibility, but audio, LAN / WLAN and Modem support will be immediate, chipset and TPM compatibility will also require a reboot. 6. Reboot the system again into the UltraBay SATA drive and you'll have a fully functional SATA OS drive in your older T4x and maintain the system settings from the other Z60t or other ThinkPad you migrated the SATA drive from.

Obviously this technique is helpful if you need to migrate large amounts to and from a SATA drive and especially when you may not have access to the UltraSlim IDE HDD adapter, or when you may have a malfunctioning native SATA system but want to preserve your environment and settings and have access to an older T4x system.

We've used this technique numerous times to repair the OS state of older T4 systems if we don't have access to the IDE adapter to remove the older T4x IDE drive and mount into the Z60t.

But this also slims down our necessity to carry two UltraBay adapters since we can take any SATA drive and use with any UltraSlim system.

PATA/SATA bridging

I decided to check one or two things based on the above statement, as I have the adapter. And indeed under Linux the device is being handled by the PATA driver. Which basically means that the adapter contains a chip to do SATA to PATA protocol conversion. I opened the adapter and found a Marvell 88SA8052 chip which is indeed a PATA/SATA bridge chip.

My guess is that the tab to prevent the device from being inserted into older ThinkPads like the T40 line is there simply to prevent them having to re-qualify (test) a whole bunch of older machines.

The newer Adapter II version is probably a true SATA pass-through device, also because newer Intel chipsets no longer have PATA support.--Tonko

Tonko, is your specimen of a newer revision than others? I guess this person found 88SA8040-NNC1 in ASM P/N 26R9247 "Made in Philippines".--Numeric (talk) 13:41, 2 November 2014 (UTC)