- Aug 25, 2001
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I have this system, which was originally an AMD XP1800+ with 768MB (2x256MB) of DDR-333 RAM. It has a single 500GB HD, with multiple partitions, connected to a Promise Ultra100TX2 IDE controller card. It runs a triple-boot of Win98se, Win2000, and WinXP.
I upgraded to a C2D E4400, 2GB of DDR-400 HyperX. I had to do a repair install of both the Win2000 and WinXP installs to get them to boot on the new hardware.
I was running it that way (and Win98se didn't want to run, kept giving me out of memory errors, then again Win98se doesn't like more than about 768MB-1GB of RAM, it flakes out, even with the Vcache and MaxPhysPage tweaks in the system.ini), and then the mobo died, or something flaked out. It died while running, and refused to boot again.
The mobo was a Conroe865PE, i865P chipset, DDR, AGP 8x, and a C2D CPU. I replaced it with a Gigabyte mobo, that was also a C2D with 865G chipset.
Had some strange issues, since the boot drive was on the Promise controller, it defaulted the driver upon the first boot with the new mobo to an older in-box promise controller driver, the one for the ultra66, which was wierd, since normally, that driver doesn't install with the Ultra100TX2 or Ultra133TX2 cards. So I don't know how it went haywire. I somehow managed to get the right driver installed (I hope). But in the meantime, I munged the FAT somehow. (Oh yeah, all of the OS partitions are on FAT32 volumes.) Rebooting the rig and running a checkdisk revealed no further disk corruption, but I'm still going to pull my recent backups and do a full file-compare to make certain.
Well, I have several identical 500GB IDE HDs stockpiled to use for this system when the main HD dies.
But my concern about whether the low-level format will stay intact, over, say, 10-15 years worth of storage time, prompts me to consider replacing the IDE HD with an SSD.
Since they don't make desktop IDE SSDs, only in laptop SATA form-factor, I'll need to use an adaptor.
I picked up a stock of IDE-to-SATA/SATA-to-IDE (Bi-dir) adaptors at MeritLine.com recently to resell, and I was thinking of using one of those, to connect a SATA SSD to my Promise Ultra100TX2 controller. I realize that in this configuration, TRIM won't be supported, so I was thinking of getting a nice, fairly big, OCZ Vertex SSD, the one with the Indilinx Barefoot controller, that has the built-in garbage collection.
My motivation isn't so much speed, as it is durability. With my limited usage of this SSD, I'm hoping that it lasts for 10 years or more.
My question is, will using a SATA HD "overpower" the SATA-to-IDE adaptor? In the FW thread about this adaptor, here , there were some issues with it:
They do now sell a different adaptor, also bi-dir, that uses a Jmicron chipset. I'm wondering if that one works better. (Edit: I just checked, and the links in the FW thread to the "new" adaptor are bringing up a blank product page now too. What's the deal with that?)
My second question is, if I purchase a "larger" SSD, can I somehow tell the SSD to use more of the space for spare sectors? The way I currently have my OS partitions set up, they don't go beyond the 24-bit LBA boundary. (I have some NTFS partitions past that.)
If I move my work partition onto a secondary magnetic HD on the same controller (port 2), then can I resize my SSD to 128GB or so, and tell it to use the remaining GBs internally as a spare sector pool? Would the "SET LBA LIMIT" command do that, or would I need some sort of special SSD diagnostic program to do that (which may be unavailable to users).
I upgraded to a C2D E4400, 2GB of DDR-400 HyperX. I had to do a repair install of both the Win2000 and WinXP installs to get them to boot on the new hardware.
I was running it that way (and Win98se didn't want to run, kept giving me out of memory errors, then again Win98se doesn't like more than about 768MB-1GB of RAM, it flakes out, even with the Vcache and MaxPhysPage tweaks in the system.ini), and then the mobo died, or something flaked out. It died while running, and refused to boot again.
The mobo was a Conroe865PE, i865P chipset, DDR, AGP 8x, and a C2D CPU. I replaced it with a Gigabyte mobo, that was also a C2D with 865G chipset.
Had some strange issues, since the boot drive was on the Promise controller, it defaulted the driver upon the first boot with the new mobo to an older in-box promise controller driver, the one for the ultra66, which was wierd, since normally, that driver doesn't install with the Ultra100TX2 or Ultra133TX2 cards. So I don't know how it went haywire. I somehow managed to get the right driver installed (I hope). But in the meantime, I munged the FAT somehow. (Oh yeah, all of the OS partitions are on FAT32 volumes.) Rebooting the rig and running a checkdisk revealed no further disk corruption, but I'm still going to pull my recent backups and do a full file-compare to make certain.
Well, I have several identical 500GB IDE HDs stockpiled to use for this system when the main HD dies.
But my concern about whether the low-level format will stay intact, over, say, 10-15 years worth of storage time, prompts me to consider replacing the IDE HD with an SSD.
Since they don't make desktop IDE SSDs, only in laptop SATA form-factor, I'll need to use an adaptor.
I picked up a stock of IDE-to-SATA/SATA-to-IDE (Bi-dir) adaptors at MeritLine.com recently to resell, and I was thinking of using one of those, to connect a SATA SSD to my Promise Ultra100TX2 controller. I realize that in this configuration, TRIM won't be supported, so I was thinking of getting a nice, fairly big, OCZ Vertex SSD, the one with the Indilinx Barefoot controller, that has the built-in garbage collection.
My motivation isn't so much speed, as it is durability. With my limited usage of this SSD, I'm hoping that it lasts for 10 years or more.
My question is, will using a SATA HD "overpower" the SATA-to-IDE adaptor? In the FW thread about this adaptor, here , there were some issues with it:
Meritline.com no longer even carries this adaptor, they seemed to have removed the product listing mere days after I ordered, which doesn't seem like a very good sign to me. They must have been getting a lot of returns. (This isn't even one of their stocked items, it drop-ships from HK.)
They do now sell a different adaptor, also bi-dir, that uses a Jmicron chipset. I'm wondering if that one works better. (Edit: I just checked, and the links in the FW thread to the "new" adaptor are bringing up a blank product page now too. What's the deal with that?)
My second question is, if I purchase a "larger" SSD, can I somehow tell the SSD to use more of the space for spare sectors? The way I currently have my OS partitions set up, they don't go beyond the 24-bit LBA boundary. (I have some NTFS partitions past that.)
If I move my work partition onto a secondary magnetic HD on the same controller (port 2), then can I resize my SSD to 128GB or so, and tell it to use the remaining GBs internally as a spare sector pool? Would the "SET LBA LIMIT" command do that, or would I need some sort of special SSD diagnostic program to do that (which may be unavailable to users).
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