Question SSD (SATA) on "old" legacy mainboard

[tcsenter]

I search the webs for installing SATA SSD on an older PC and it seems everyone who wants to write about thinks an "older" PC means chipsets that were already on 2nd Gen SATA and PCI Express with AHCI support. Even Toms Hardware did a pointless write up on installing SSD on an "old" PC, published in 2011 and used an "old" motherboard based on Intel P45/ICH10R (from 2009/2010). But they call it "2005" tech because they used one of the first LGA775 P4 CPU which of course has nothing to do with storage compatibility at all.

I'm talking about an "old" PC with 1st Gen SATA 150, IDE/PATA, and AGP! Is there any reason relatively new SATA SSD (120GB) could not work on older hardware if the SATA controller/ports are configured in BIOS for legacy IDE/ATA compatibility or emulation? e.g. a real 2004-2005 era PC with ICH5 or equivalent 1st gen SATA ports from VIA, NVIDIA, AMD, SIS, etc?

Edit: excepting the notorious SATA bug on VIA Southbridge VT823x where it would choke on detecting SATA II 3.0Gbps drives, had to use the compatibility jumper (or firmware utility) on the HDD to force SATA-150 mode, which SSD do not offer. So remove VIA from consideration altogether.

 

[mikeymikec]

What chipset is the PC you're talking about? If it's Intel then I'd say it has a better chance of working reasonably with a SSD than the alternatives.

An nForce chipset board of the AM3 era I encountered was problematic running a SSD in IDE mode because Win10 kept wanting to switch the IDE drivers to what it thought should be used (the nForce IDE drivers) instead of what I found to work perfectly fine (MS IDE). In doing so, it added about three minutes to the boot-up routine.

Other chipsets like ALi / SiS sometimes don't implement the SATA standard correctly and require newer drives to have drive jumpers to force 1.5Gbps instead of the graceful automatic fallback which would be normally expected to occur.

AMD AM3 chipsets are known to have problems with Samsung SSDs which require one to disable NCQ, but that's an AHCI only issue I think. Some people on this forum have said that disabling NCQ is hugely problematic for performance, but I didn't notice any difference in say boot-up performance on multiple AM3 builds I've done. While I'm sure there will be a performance disadvantage in some scenarios, if we're talking about the likely scenario whereby a user with basic needs and a minimal budget wants more performance, it still provides the kind of step up in performance that one would expect in going from booting Win10 from a HDD to Win10 on a SSD.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm of the opinion, that for systems pre-dating Sandy Bridge chipsets, eg. FX, AM2/2+/3/3+, or even nForce, best to pick up a PCI or PCI-E ASMedia dual-port SATA6G card. You'll only get 500MB/sec to a single port on PCI-E 2.0 x1, but that should be enough.

Best though, and this has been tested in Win10 and Win7 64-bit, that those ASMedia SATA chipsets are auto-detected as AHCI-compatible, out of the box.

 

[Shmee]

What motherboard are you trying to work with? Just a tip here, it may not be applicable to your board, but on an old s939 NF4 SLI board I have, AHCI is not a select-able option, however I can select RAID in the menu for SATA operation, and that is a subset of AHCI so I should get the benefits. Using it with Lubuntu on an old Crucial SSD.

 

[tcsenter]

Thanks for responses! It's actually an acquaintance I'm helping remotely. The mainboard is older LGA775 on SiS 661FX + 964 chipset, no 2nd storage controller chip. The only BIOS option is ATA/IDE and RAID mode. Haven't heard back on it for a few days.

 

[yottabit]

I’ve got an Inland 120 GB SATA SSD running just fine in a Dell Pentium 4 that happened to have SATA ports. So I’m guessing you’ll be fine

 

[tcsenter]

I’ve got an Inland 120 GB SATA SSD running just fine in a Dell Pentium 4 that happened to have SATA ports. So I’m guessing you’ll be fine

That Dell P4 probably using Intel chipset with ICH5/6, that had no problems with compatibility negotiating the correct (1.5 Gbps) speed link with later SATA specifications like 3.0 Gbps. The VIA and SiS stuff, not so much.

 

[SPBHM]

some people dealing with old VIA boards prefer to run the SSD with a PATA adapter even if limited to 100MBs because it works fine and they have issues with using the sata controller, I have no experience with that,
on intel ICH7 SSDs work just fine, it lacks AHCI but still is a very good bump in performance compared to a hard drive.