WildW
Senior member
I'm considering some upgrades to my old laptop - now 5 years old and going strong. Toshiba Portege A100 with 1.4GHz Pentium M, XP Pro. Currently 512MB ram, will be upgrading that as it thrashes the hard drive a bit.
Anyhow, was considering if there were any available hard disk upgrades. It has a 160GB 5400RPM 2.5" drive, upgraded from the original 40GB a few years ago. Was looking to see if there were any 7200rpm drives around but since it needs to be PATA there's no stock anywhere these days.
Then I remembered the fad for using CompactFlash cards in IDE adaptors as a cheapy SSD a couple of years back, with the Sandisk Ultra 4 cards supposedly being quite speedy. Nothing like a proper SSD of course, but perhaps enough for a laptop that only gets used for web/office kind of tasks.
Does anyone have experience of doing this and whether it'd be usable in speed terms? I think I could live with an 8GB C drive - big enough for XP and Office. Would it slow to a crawl during writing? Die a death when using the swapfile?
Anyhow, was considering if there were any available hard disk upgrades. It has a 160GB 5400RPM 2.5" drive, upgraded from the original 40GB a few years ago. Was looking to see if there were any 7200rpm drives around but since it needs to be PATA there's no stock anywhere these days.
Then I remembered the fad for using CompactFlash cards in IDE adaptors as a cheapy SSD a couple of years back, with the Sandisk Ultra 4 cards supposedly being quite speedy. Nothing like a proper SSD of course, but perhaps enough for a laptop that only gets used for web/office kind of tasks.
Does anyone have experience of doing this and whether it'd be usable in speed terms? I think I could live with an 8GB C drive - big enough for XP and Office. Would it slow to a crawl during writing? Die a death when using the swapfile?
