T61/X61 SATA II 1.5 Gb/s cap - willing to pay for a solution

I have already sent out alerts to the bios fix being available on the mydigitallife and thinkpads.com related threads pointing to middleton's post in this thread.

Perhaps middleton can just create a new thread in the marketplace detailing his offer and how to "buy it" and point traffic from his above post there?

 

Here is the link to marketplace forum:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/nbr-marketplace/501056-price-check-thinkpad-t61-x61-sata-ii-maximum-speed-bios-fix.html

Let's discuss my BIOS fix there.

 

i'm intelligent enough to figure that out.   the difference here is that you've potentially opened the door for an entirely new set of data.   to date, no one has been able to take the same chipset, same BIOS, and same system and test capped against uncapped performance.   comparing different systems creates a variable.   with your BIOS mod, everything is identical except the ATA throughput.

if you aren't willing to do capped vs. uncapped tests then that's understandable.   it would be a decent amount of labor.   all i'm saying is that i'd like to see real-world tests outside of synthetic benchmarks to prove or disprove that uncapping the 150 Mbps limitation actually makes a tangible difference.

i'm not discounting your efforts at all.   in fact, i commend you for what you've done.   i simply want to see someone prove once and for all that this is a big deal, that's all.

 

erik, I'm not willing to do capped vs. uncapped tests because I'm not an owner of T61 or X61 ThinkPad. I've not even seen any lenovo laptop in real life . I don't need a real laptops at hand to make BIOS mods for them.

 

how did you confirm your BIOS works with these systems and while using various accessories like docks, ultrabases, and various ultrabay drives including both PATA and SATA HDD adapters?

i agree that you may not need a physical laptop in-hand to modify a BIOS, calculate the checksum, and repackage it.   but, you do need one to test that the mods actually work under various scenarios.   i'm sure any potential users of your modded BIOSes would want some sort of assurance that what they're getting has been tested.

 

Maybe Lenovo should employ you, before HP and Dell snaps you up.

 

I'm going to debunk this thread pretty hardcore, and I'm going to do it with half math and half common sense. First, the math:

1.5Gbps is 1,500,000,000 bits per second.

Divide by eight (there's 8 bits for every 1 byte) and you get 187,500,000 bytes per second.

Divide by 1048576 (that's how many bytes are in one megabyte) and you get 178.814... So, roughly 179MBps.

Thus, if your SSD can sustain 179MB/sec then you might get some benefit out of this BIOS mod.

Second, the common sense: application and boot times aren't driven by raw sequential reads and writes. When your Windows OS takes 60 seconds to load from a spinning disk, what noise do you associate with this process? If your laptop (and disk indicator light) is like my aging Dell E1505 (and my home-brew desktop, and my wife's Dell Mini 10, and my office Optiplex 960, and my other office T500), then it's a whole big pile of ticking and 'crunching' noise from the disk.

All this noise is your read/write heads scurrying about the platters on the disk, grasping for the data strewn across the platters. The epic killer of boot and application load times from a disk IO perspective is not raw sequential reads (even if they DO help...). No, the killer is random seek times. Raw reads of 170mb/sec are only about 2.5x faster than a really good 7200RPM disk. But raw seek times of 0.1msec are about 60x faster than a really good 7200RPM disk.

If you've installed an SSD and are getting abysmal boot times, I'm having a hard time believing that it's your drive. Rather, I'd be pointing a finger at two other things: the northbridge of your chipset (which controls PCI interface lanes, which is where your SATA controller is connected) or the CPU itself.

Via testing with a few T400 and T500 models, it turns out that your CPU is the most epic bottleneck on a 'good' SSD. Just have a look at your task manager while the machine is booting, and you'll see it pegged out to 100% on both cores.

This isn't hard to figure out, folks. A little bit of research can go a long way...

 

I am very very tempted to test his (I have both Intel G2 and Vertex SSDs).

However, as this is an untested BIOS there is always the possibility that the laptop ends up being bricked.

Some questions.

1) What version of the T61 BIOS have you modified?

2) Have you modified any other Lenovo BIOS before and had users flash it without bricking their machines?

3) Have you modified any other Lenovo BIOS before which resulted in a bricked machine when users flashed their machines with it?

4) Have you ever done any WWAN whitelist mods for Lenovo BIOSes?

 

middleton, consider releasing the bios fix to some beta testers under NDA who can confirm:

1. it flashes providing a functional system
2. does provide performance benefits

I can't see users being so trusting as to otherwise part with their $$ with the possibility of bricking their box.

I'd also suggest pegging your cost to ~US$25 to anyone that wants the modded bios. That's what I've seen WWAN/wifi bios whitelist modders charge. And that's to do compression/decompression, patching, checksum as well as provide a recovery process in case the user flash goes bad.

We know for sure that sequential read/writes AND multithreaded 4kb read/writes on a Intel SSD or better will see performance benefit. Your bios mod could also raise the s/h profile of T61p/X61 systems as they are probably devalued because of their SATA-I performance.

 

i think 20 to 30 dollars is the psychological price barrier for most people for this sort of mod. If you price it at anything higher, you would generate less number of sales and total revenues. You are aiming for sales volume here.