Hanno's blog

Recently, my old harddisk produced some errors. As I care for my data, I immediately replaced it and decided to invest in an SSD.

My laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad T61) is already some years old, so I'm quite aware that I won't get the best possible performance out of it. But I found something really interesting. The BIOS seems to limit the SATA II speed and there's an unofficial BIOS mod to remove that limitation. It's also available for a couple of other Thinkpad models (beside T61 also for R61, X61, X300 and variants of them).

The BIOS mod also does a number of other things, for example the official BIOS has a whitelist of allowed wireless chips. That gets removed.

The full feature list from the readme file:
- Disabled whitelist check.
- Enabled SATA II full speed.
- Added SLIC 2.1 table.
- Removed "Thermal sensing error" boot message (Penryn CPUs).
- Added dual-IDA support.

Obivous Warning: You're doing this at your own risk. If any unofficial BIOS destroys your laptop or your data, that's bad luck. The only thing I can tell is that I didn't experience any problems and that so far, a lot of people seem to use these BIOS mods without problems.

Now I did some before-after-benchmarking. I used hdparm -tT /dev/sda and a simple dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/out.img bs=8k count=256k. I started the benchmark after a fresh boot without anything else running to avoid disturbances. I ran the tests a couple of times and will only give you the last result of each tests, but they didn't differ much. The results:

	before	after
hdparm cached read	3069.01 MB/s	6900.56 MB/s
hdparm buffered read	131.38 MB/s	251.79 MB/s
dd write	106 MB/s	209 MB/s

Quite impressive, isn't it? I just doubled the speed of my disk for free. I'm aware that benchmarking is a tricky business and the impact this has on my overall system performance is probably difficult to put in numbers, but the results are significant enough that I think it was worth it.

Slightly related: There's also a modified firmware for the Optiarc AD7910A CD/DVD burner that's shipped in my laptop.

Inzwischen berichtet sogar Pro-Linux schon, wir (LUG Backnang) hatten vor kurzem die Idee, zu Weihnachten noch eine DVD voll mit freier Software und freien Filmen zu veröffentlichen.

Die Mischung ist uns glaub ganz gut gelungen, die Spanne der Musik reicht von Klassik bis zum Elektronischen, neben den bekannten CC-Filmen Route66 und ch7 haben wir auch so etwas wie den Klassier Nosferatu (Copyright abgelaufen) mit draufgepackt.

Bei der Recherche für die DVD ist mir wieder aufgefallen, dass es immer wieder in großen Mengen interessante freie Kulturgüter zu entdecken gibt. Das Projekt wird aller vorraussicht nach seine Fortsetzung finden, Vorschläge hierfür werden gerne entgegengenommen.

Die DVD gibt's unter http://tuxmas.lug-bk.de/