Not a problem, but perhaps this will help someone else.

Background: My Thinkpad T60 has a 500GB SATA drive.  When
I travel with it, I bring along an identical 500GB drive
in an Ultrabay swap tray for backups.  I could dd copy the
main drive to the swap drive in about 3 hours, overnight.

Then something went wrong.  On the last trip, it took >4 days.
hdparm -t for the main drive is 50MB/s .  The Ultrabay drive
ran at an abysmal 1.3MB/s.  I could not set dma mode with
hdparm -d1 .  After some failed debugging, I ordered a SATA
enclosure and Expressbus SATA card, which will arrive today.

  Last night, I found the problem.  The BIOS settings
  for the SATA controller somehow got changed from AHCI
  mode to Compatability mode.  When I set the BIOS to AHCI,
  hdparm -t went back to 79MB/sec.  Back to 3 hours.  

Some windoze folks have problems with AHCI unless they load
the right Intel drivers.  So the default is Compatability
mode, even if it makes the Ultrabay slow as hell.  BTW, the
T60 Ultrabay actually has a PATA interface, and the swap tray
has a translator chip to SATA in it.  Kludge!  The newer
Thinkpads feed both SATA and PATA to the Ultrabay, IIRC.

I expect the SATAII connection will be quite a bit faster,
since I will be using different buses to stream the data
from drive to drive.  But since the goal was to back up the
drive overnight when travelling, shaving the time under 3
hours is not an urgent need.  Maybe faster will be needful
when I upgrade to >1TB laptop drives, though I'm using
"only" 140GB now.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs