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Nice upgrade for old PCs (www.startech.com)

submitted 23 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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:

40-Pin PATA to 2.5" SATA HDD/SSD/ODD Converter mounted on SATA SSD

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.

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[–] LucasWaffyWaf 9 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

These work splendidly for modding your Xbox with a bigger, faster hard drive. You'd need an 80 pin IDE cable, but otherwise it's worth it.

Just note that there's not much a speed difference between a HDD and an SSD since it's bottlenecked by the IDE cable, but an SSD would be quieter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago

cloud capital performs five roles that used to be beyond capital’s capacities: It grabs our attention. It manufactures our desires. It sells to us,

hdparm reported higher throughput value. maybe 10/15%. I'll take it.

[–] roofuskit 8 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Just don't waste your money installing a high end drive. It's never going to touch the peak throughput of the drive.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

The drive cost me a big fat nothing 🙂 I'm adding stuff to this machine only if it's free.

That's also why it has two DVD drives: one of them writes to DVD-RAM but has a dead CD laser, while the other still have CD support. But... both were free 🙂

[–] roofuskit 5 points 22 hours ago

It was just a general PSA.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

That's not the point, it'll still be faster and more responsive. Even if only by moving the bottleneck

[–] roofuskit 3 points 22 hours ago

It was just a general PSA. You can get away with a cheaper drive as long as it's reliable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Windows XP doesn’t have TRIM support and will kill the SSD in short order if I run it.

WinXP doesn't but some manufacturers do offer TRIM support via software. Samsung Magician for example.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Blue_Morpho 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I don't think that poor 20-year-old PC would do very well with a hypervisor 🙂

[–] Blue_Morpho 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago

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.