Upgrade Asus W7J with SSD?

Now that SSD prices have dropped I am looking to bring my Asus W7J back to life and speed it up a bit.
It does have a SATA port but I am trying to figure out if SSD would work on this old laptop? Does the bios support it?
Tried looking on this forum and the world wide web and couldn't find anything concrete.

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

 

Any SATA device will fit on any SATA port, SATA is backwards compatible so no matter which version you have ti will work, max speed will be limited by the slowest of the SATA interfaces though.

If you have windows 7 on that laptop, go for it with any SSD. Otherwise, you'll likely want for SSDs that have garbage collection that can handle itself without TRIM.

 

Thanks for the prompt reply.

I don't think the W7J has ACHI support. Does it matter?

Also, how do I tell if the SSD is capable of its own garbage collection without TRIM? I will probably stick with Win XP as drivers will be an issue with Win 7.

Thanks

 

AHCI is faster, but IDE mode still works fine, although if you have a setting for RAID in your bios, single drives in RAID should default to AHCI.

As for the SSD, the older Intel SSDs like the G1 have their own GC algorithm. The Kingston SSD now V100 also has some pretty robust GC. I'm sure there are more recent drives with GC that works alright in non TRIM provided there is enough free space available as well.

 

W7J, wow. That was one of my first ASUS notebooks!

AHCI is supported on the ICH7-M, but the BIOS must have an option to enable it.

I wouldn't worry about it though, it's SATA II/3Gbps.

Your real bottleneck will be the CPU and RAM, not AHCI.

 

LOL, yup good old W7J. Its one solidly built notebook, still kicking. Its mainly used for surfing and kids computer so figured give it some boost with the recent drop in SSD prices, currently still using the original hard drive that came with it.

Thanks guys for the help and input, went ahead and got a Sandisk Extreme 120GB SSD. After some further research seems like a few have been able to get Win 7 on it working (drivers), so gonna try that first. Looking forward to it!

Cheers!

 

For what it's worth, I just found out tonight that my W7J does not like the OCZ 60GB drive (model SLD3-25SAT3-60G).
It's acting very erratic and the Linux kernel is complaining about dropped DMA requests and whatnot, constantly resetting the SATA bus. Seems to work fine when I have it on a USB<->SATA adapter, so I dont think the drive's defective. I'll try it in my big desktop machine later and I guess shop for another drive for my W7J.

[edit]
Woohoo! nevermind! updated the OCZ firmware and now it works just fine!