SSD on D610

Sorry if this is a re-post. I've had trouble searching these forums lately (not sure what's up), but I thought I would share some results.

I finally got around to ordering a SATA modular bay that is compatible with the D series latitudes. I've been hanging onto my D610 for a while now, since it makes a perfectly good surfing/emailing notebook, but was curious about expanding storage. I also had a new SSD drive sitting, waiting to go into my new M14x, so thought I'd run a test or two with all components. After installing said SSD in the SATA modular bay, it appears that the SSD is light-years faster than the PATA drive native to the D610/D600 systems.

I only ran a few drive benchmarks, but the SSD was easily outpacing the IDE drive 20-40-fold.

Has anybody else messed with such a setup? I wonder if it's worth the time and effort, since bottlenecks are likely to be in many other places on such old notebooks. I had planned on using the SATA modular thing for extra storage at the very least.

I just thought this was cool, nonetheless.


Scott

 

Up until around this time last year, I was running an HP TC4200 off of a CF card connected to the PATA bus. Definitely not fast compared to contemporary SSDs, but much faster, much quieter, and much less power-hungry than a conventional PATA hard drive. Was very happy with that setup.

Up until a month ago,my old fileserver ran off of a first-gen Samsung SSD connected to the PATA bus via a PATA to SATA bridge. Either the limits of the PATA bus itself or the bridge capped both sequential speeds to about 70MB/s, but I was able to get the drive's full 5MB/s random write speed.

In general, my take is that even if a new SSD is limited in sequential read/write speed on an old bus, the gains you get in random read/write performance still make it worthwhile... assuming you're going to keep said system around.