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SSD for an older PC

L

Lazarus52980

Senior member
I have a P4 3.2 machine at home that I was going to try to use for an internet/e-mail machine for my wife and kids. The hard drive died on it and since it always felt slow I was going to try to replace the hard drive with a 40 gig SSD. I was discussing this with a friend of mine and he told me he thinks it will really not be much faster than a normal hard drive would be in the same system. Is this true? Would I be wasting my money?
 
You may run into a few problems with this setup. First, you're probably using an older OS (windows XP?), which does not fully support SSDs (they'll lose performance over time due to lack of TRIM). Second, with a system that old, any modern hard drive would be a big improvement, so putting a lot of money (even $85 for a 40GB SSD) may be a waste when you can get a lot of improvement from a 500GB hard drive for $50 (like the Samsung F3). Third, you'll need to set AHCI instead of IDE in the BIOS to get the full speed improvement of an SSD, and you may not have that option in your older BIOS.

And one last problem - does your system even have SATA interfaces? I don't believe the P4 generation motherboards had moved away from IDE yet.
 
I was intending to install windows 7 on the machine since I have an extra copy (don't ask, long story) and yes, my last hard drive was a SATA, so it does have SATA ports.

As far as BIOS, it is a Gateway machine, so I doubt I have many BIOS options, but I have not looked at that yet... Does AHCI really make that much difference??
 
The SandForce drives have good garbage collection, so running in IDE mode wouldn't be that bad. I think it would be a great speed boost. I'd be sure to put in 3 or 4GB memory. W7 doesn't need it, but it uses it quite well.
 
Lazarus52980 said:
I was intending to install windows 7 on the machine since I have an extra copy (don't ask, long story) and yes, my last hard drive was a SATA, so it does have SATA ports.

As far as BIOS, it is a Gateway machine, so I doubt I have many BIOS options, but I have not looked at that yet... Does AHCI really make that much difference??
Click to expand...

You probably wouldn't have the AHCI Bios option anyway, due to the age of the motherboard, and without AHCI, you lose both TRIM (automated maintenance of the drive under W7) and some performance, but...

FishAk said:
The SandForce drives have good garbage collection, so running in IDE mode wouldn't be that bad. I think it would be a great speed boost. I'd be sure to put in 3 or 4GB memory. W7 doesn't need it, but it uses it quite well.
Click to expand...

...as FishAk mentions, the SandForce drives are pretty good without TRIM.

Here's the Agility 2 40GB drive on sale today only (with coupon: 24HRSALE929B) for $85AR: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...pk=agility%202

My personal opinion is that for simple web surfing, SSDs are a nice perk (and obviously their lower capacity isn't a problem), but they are still somewhat bleeding-edge, and might introduce unexpected problems. Maybe not the way to go in a system that old, since it's fairly CPU-limited anyway.
 
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Termie said:
You probably wouldn't have the AHCI Bios option anyway, due to the age of the motherboard, and without AHCI, you lose both TRIM (automated maintenance of the drive under W7) and some performance, but...
Click to expand...
The MS IDE drivers support TRIM as well, so the he'd only lose NCQ (and hot swapping)
 
A P4 3.2 is no slouch and can take advantage of the speed. Additionally nearly all SSDs are 2.5" meaning even if you ditch the computer, you can still use it in the next PC or notebook or toss it in a enclosure as a super durable (albeit expensive) portable drive.

As long as the SSD you buy is all the size you need and you don't spend too much, ($1.5 a GIG is a great sale price), it will not be a waste of money.
 
Lazarus52980 said:
Wait, so if the MS drivers support TRIM, should I still get the Agility 2 drive, or should I get something different?
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I didn't know that about the MS IDE drivers supporting TRIM. The Agility 2 is still the best drive in the price range, but you can get slightly cheaper drives that will be sufficient for your needs, such as the Kingston 30GB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820139162. It's really only a bit cheaper at $70.

The OCZ Onyx 32GB is cheaper after rebate at $58: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227510

Either of those will offer plenty of performance.
 
I've put a 30GB OCZ Onyx in a 2.8GHz P4 system. Definitely worth it. Boots into XP in about 15 seconds. Resumes from suspend mode in a snap. Faster everything. Best part is, when the system craps out, or you're ready to upgrade, you can take the SSD with you to whatever system you're migrating to. It's not a dead-end upgrade like DDR1 or AGP video card.

Note that your mobo (and mine) only supports SATA I, so you'll be topped out at about ~140Mb/s read/write speeds. So if you're planning on keeping the SSD in your current system for a long time (> 1-2 years), you might want to save money and go with Agility 1 (or get the 60GB version for the same price as the 40GB Agility 2) as they will both saturate your SATA I interface.


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...E20-227-607-TS
 
jaydee said:
Note that your mobo (and mine) only supports SATA I, so you'll be topped out at about ~140Mb/s read/write speeds
Click to expand...

While this is true for sequential operations, the small file reads/writes don't come close to saturating even SATA I. And this is exactly the same spot that SSDs really shine compared to HDDs.
 
In most laptop forums adding an SSD is the best bang for buck on an old laptop. Much better than an upgraded CPU.

The momentus hybrid is a good second choice.

For IDE only the Samsung HM160HC 160GB is pretty fast.
 
Emulex said:
sata 1 no ncq = very bad for non linear reads/writes
Click to expand...

That's a good point, and I hadn't thought of it. But in normal use, as described by the OP, and not a large amount of multitasking, I understand there is a shallow queue depth, as discussed here. In this situation, do you think the lack of NCQ will have much of an effect? Perhaps I don't understand NCQ.
 
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