Hi

I use the A31p with 2x Travelstar 100GB, 7200 RPM (PATA, 2,5"/one in ultrabay) drives on stage and I need to get the most speed&reliability speed out of exactly that machine. As far as I remember the traverlstar has a read/write speed of about 40-50 MByte/sec and seek times of about 10ms.

I have two issues:

(1) can I safely use drives bigger than 128GB in the A31p?
(2) Can somebody recommend a fast and compatible 128GB (or bigger) SSD ??

Tips and sharing of own SSD tests are welcome.

Thank you

A31/A31p natively takes any capacity 2.5" PATA drive.
The largest available is the 320GB WD Scorpio Blue.
If you buy an Ultrabay 2000 SATA adapter for 2nd HD, you can use SATA drives up to 1TB.
(Put this in the Ultrabay Plus bay).
Have no experience with SSD yet.

You might want to re-think the SSD idea, since you need a PATA SSD for A31p, and these are usually a deadly combination of being small and expensive.

Secondly, if you're intent on running XP (W7 has really no business running on A31p - been there and done that), you really should get a SLC SSD. More money out of the window.

All of that to be once again choked by transfer speeds of 2002 vintage...is it worth it?

Chances are, any newer high quality conventional hard drive (Samsung HM160HC would be my choice) will be more than fast enough for a machine of this generation.

In my book, SSD on A31p is a waste.

And - for the record - A31p is and will always be my favourite ThinkPad.

Good luck.

Well I am using the A31p for live music application where a high amount of data is streamed from the hard drive. The faster the transfer rate and the smaller the access time is the faster I could reboot and the more instruments could be played back at the same time.

It would of cource be decisive that the SSD provides a significant improvement vs. the Hitachi 7k100 Pata drive.

Regards

I like the idea of an Ultrabay 2nd hard drive caddy with an SSD in it.
Not setup to try it just now, but would be interesting to see.

Pro: ultrabay slot in an ancient A31p
Con: SSD

Not sure what'd win out with the above combo...

You could buy an ultrabay HD caddy fairly cheaply, then get a cheap SSD < $100 and see how it goes...

If this is new to you, read up on booting from an ultrabay slot vs. internal hard drive...the stuff about PF12 at boot, then select bootable drive, etc.

I bought an aftermarket SATA ultrabay adapter, put an Intel 80gb G2 SSD in it, cloned the boot partition from the hard drive to the SSD, then removed the boot partition from the hard drive (leaving another partition on the hard drive to store files). I used Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2009 for the cloning, etc.

All is working well. There is not much of a speed boost due to the bottleneck in the IDE controllers in this old machine.

This is not a cost effective upgrade if you are a middle-class dude like me; I just happened to have the SSD lying around and enjoy messing with laptops. Heck, the drive cost much more than I paid for the A31P.

Here are some HD Tach numbers on the SSD in the A31P ultrabay (Windows XP):
Random access: 0.1ms
Burst speed: 32.1 mb/s
Average read speed 30.7mb/s

@ frankie01:

First, welcome to the forum!

Since I understand that you have an "urgent" need (but how "urgent" is urgent??), the following hint may perhaps be less interesting, because it will take at least a week to get the parts, but nevertheless - for your education in the noble art of ThinkPads! - I'd just want to point your attention to a clever idea, by aid of which you can swap your present main 2.5" PATA (mechanical) harddrive by a 1.8" SATA (yes, SATA, and not IDE/PATA) SSD. Benefit by this: High speed owing to the SSD, and you will retain your UltraBay e.g. CD-ROM unaffected? Also, SATA SSD's have far better performance compared to PATA SSD's and are far cheaper (compared to the best, fast PATA SLC SSD's).

Wow, how do you do this? Well, see the thread 1.8" SATA to 2.5" IDE converter? and, if in a hurry, skip the first many posts and jump directly e.g. to this post. Very briefly, what you need is this IDE 44 Pin to 1.8" Micro SATA Adapter and a 1.8" SATA SSD of your choice (e.g. an Intel X18-M), and then, for your convenience, one of the caddies by your very clever countryman, forum member tomatenfisch. That's all!

Johan

tanstaafl wrote:



Indeed.

SSD should do much better than that to become a viable option for these old beaasts.

For sheer comparison purposes, here's some data from HD Tune on my A31p with 80GB/7200rpm Seagate drive in the main bay, running XP:

minimum transfer rate: 23.7 MB/sec

maximum transfer rate: 42.6 MB/sec

average: 34.4 MB/sec

burst rate: 72.8 MB/sec

access time: 14.8 ms

I have tested several SSD against Hitachi 7k100 on A31 WInXP system with Crystal Mark 3.0 (5 times 1Gb)
Seq R/W - 512k R/W - 4k R/W - 4kQD32 R/W
Hitachi 7k100: 43.86/37.81 - 22.01/18.48 - 0.356/0.625 - 0.529/0.661
MCCOE64G : 40.00/30.78 - 40.12/7.781 - 13.01/0.165 - 13.86/0.178
MCBQE32G : 54.65/34.09 - 54.62/8.386 - 12.95/0.108 - 14.34/0.107
FZM64GF18H: 30.28/25.49 - 29.42/6.250 - 3.685/0.067 - 4.303/0.041

Hitachi 7k100 is a 2.5" conventional harddisk used as OS drive C: (NTFS file system) at HDD bay
MCCOE64G is a Samsung 64Gb SLC SSD with ZIF interface, removed from Lenovo 41W0736 SSD module. It is firmware limited to UDMA44 (Samsung branded one is UDMA66 capable). Tested at empty as D: (NTFS file system) in Ultrabay with appropriate adapter
MCBQE32G is an older Samsung 32Gb SLC SSD with 50pin PATA interface. NOS bought from eBay. Tested at empty as D: (FAT32 file system) in Ultrabay with appropriate adapter
FZM64GF18H is a Super Talent MasterDrive GF series 64Gb MLC SSD with ZIF interface. Tested at empty as D: (NTFS file system) in Ultrabay with appropriate adapter

A31 is my conditioner for harddisk/SSD intended for other notebook or electronic devices. I have a collections of various adapters.