Hard disk capacity limits

[karotlopj]

Are there any limits on the capacity of hard disks on ThinkPads in general, or X61's in particular?

I know throughput may be restricted, but what about size?

[TPFanatic]

Physically, X61 is intended to fit up to a 9.5mm height 2.5" SATA drive in its main SATA bay, and a 2.5" 9.5mm height IDE or SATA drive adapted in its docking IDE Ultrabay. SSDs have already breached 4TB in the 2.5" SATA format, I'm not current on if they've gone larger yet.

X61 has two MPCIE slots intended for WLAN and Turbo memory (latter shared with WWAN slot). These can technically be converted to m-key MPCIE 1x and then fit 2230 or 2242 NVME drives; however, with current adapters they physically don't fit under the palmrest. Subsequent X200 model with its hollow spaces can fit these with no problem.

There's some sort of BIOS limit, wherein non-UEFI without GPT support can only recognize up to 2.2TB partitions.

I don't own any drives larger than 2TB so I personally haven't experimented with how to get the old thinkpads to do anything with bigger drives.

[karotlopj]

Many thanks.