I had one of those IDE-to-SATA converters lying around in my drawer for some reason. I used it to throw a modern 500G SSD into my old P4:
I transferred my Debian install from the period 160G HDD onto the SSD drive and now it's nice and quiet, and quite a bit speedier than the original IDE HDD.
But I only use it with Linux because Windows XP doesn't have TRIM support and will kill the SSD in short order if I run it. Linux on the other hand... no problem, it's safe:
~$ lsblk --discard
NAME DISC-ALN DISC-GRAN DISC-MAX DISC-ZERO
fd0 0 0B 0B 0
fd1 0 0B 0B 0
sda 0 512B 2G 0
├─sda1 0 512B 2G 0
├─sda2 0 512B 2G 0
└─sda3 0 512B 2G 0
sr0 0 0B 0B 0
sr1 0 0B 0B 0
(Non-zero DISC-GRAN and DISC-MAX values indicates TRIM support)
Another proof that Linux is just plain better 😉
The machine has been rocking this disk all day long without any problem. I recommend this little doodad.
WinXP doesn't but some manufacturers do offer TRIM support via software. Samsung Magician for example.
Yeah I know, but that requires work to setup and I don't really care about XP all that much. It was there on the spinning hard drive when I installed Linux alongside it, so I didn't remove it because, well, it worked so why trash it. But here on this new drive, I have no need for Windows. So I just left it on the now-decommissioned HDD. If I ever have a desperate need for it, I can always open up the machine and reconnect the old HDD.
If you run a hypervisor like proxmox you don't get automatic trim either. You need to manually setup cron trim. Auto trim also is disabled with filesystems like zfs because of performance problems.
You may have been running without trim and never noticed
I don't think that poor 20-year-old PC would do very well with a hypervisor 🙂
I was referring to other PCs you have. You were worried about not running trim would kill the ssd when it's possible your new PC isn't running trim either.
Ah right okay. Well, I'm a developer. All my machines are either development machines or build servers and they all run Linux bare metal. I have no need for hypervisors. My main machine is 13 years old and it has 4 of the same 500G SSD I installed in the old P4, I've been beating the hell out of them 8 hours a day for years and they're still doing fine.