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    PATA SSD Worth it? Good manufacturer?

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by jcmeyer5, Oct 30, 2009.

  1. jcmeyer5

    jcmeyer5 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I am trying to breath a little more life into my dad's Thinkpad T42. One of the biggest upgrades I can make at this point is the HDD. Seeing as SSD's hold a significant performance improvements, I thought I woud check it out. Unfortunately, this laptop has a PATA drive. Seeing as he is on XP, is unlikely to move to W7, and looking at a PATA SSD, he will likely never have TRIM. I dont mind getting a 64GB and only partitioning and formatting to only allow 50GB or so to give the drive space to work. Question is... is it worth it? Are there garabage collection utilities to help with performance?

    Thanks!

    Jim
     
    jcmeyer5, Oct 30, 2009
    #1
  2. moral hazard

    moral hazard Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    moral hazard, Oct 30, 2009
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  3. Greg

    Greg Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    You will still be limited to PATA speeds, even with that converter. So roughly 100MB/s tops.
     
    Greg, Oct 30, 2009
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  4. K-TRON

    K-TRON Hi, I'm Jimmy Diesel ^_^

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    You may be better off sticking with a mechanical drive.
    What harddrive do you have in your laptop now?

    Upgrading to the Samsung HM160HC will most likely give you a tremendous increase in system responsiveness. It is the fastest harddrive for the 2.5" PATA interface.
    Here is my review of the drive. At $50 or so it goes for these days, you cant beat it.
    http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=264209

    K-TRON
     
    K-TRON, Oct 31, 2009
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  5. laserbullet

    laserbullet Notebook Evangelist

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    http://www.dvnation.com/IDE-PATA-SSD.html

    For the price I certainly don't recommend them, but this topic unearthed my curiosity, does anybody know if those Photofast PATA SSDs have good performance? They seem like they would logically be the best since they use an Indilinx controller.
     
    laserbullet, Oct 31, 2009
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  6. Greg

    Greg Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    At those prices you are better off getting an X25-M with a PATA converter.

    Or better yet: an OCZ that doesn't brick every firmware update
     
    Greg, Oct 31, 2009
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  7. Commander Wolf

    Commander Wolf can i haz broadwell?

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    I've been looking for a good PATA SSD for a while now, because I think it is worth it.

    I bought a RunCore Pro IV PATA drive which is similar to the Photofast device, but at half the price. It was pretty damn fast for a PATA drive, but it had serious compatibility issues. Worked perfectly in a Latitude D610, but not in my TC4200, which is where I wanted to use it. So I returned it.

    I'm going to try a Samsung ZIF drive next. Nowhere as fast, but at this point if it works, I'll be happy.
     
    Commander Wolf, Oct 31, 2009
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  8. highlandsun

    highlandsun Notebook Evangelist

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    My Transcend 128GB PATA SSD works ok in my M6Ne.
     
    highlandsun, Oct 31, 2009
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  9. Commander Wolf

    Commander Wolf can i haz broadwell?

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    Yeah, but this almost certainly has a JMicron controller, which nobody wants these days...

    Otherwise I probably would have bought one of these Transcend PATA drives as well. They've got a bunch of 'em.
     
    Commander Wolf, Oct 31, 2009
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  10. highlandsun

    highlandsun Notebook Evangelist

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    True, but since pretty much nobody is making new PATA SSDs these days, there's not much alternative. And with my filesystem cache tuned up, I almost never see any write bottlenecks. (But yes, they still occur.)
     
    highlandsun, Oct 31, 2009
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  11. Kallogan

    Kallogan Notebook Deity

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    Kallogan, Oct 31, 2009
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  12. User Retired 2

    User Retired 2 Notebook Nobel Laureate NBR Reviewer

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    Runcore ProIV IDE uses Indilinx Barefoot controller as does the complete ProIV range and is half the price of the Photofast V3.

    Otherwise consider using your optical bay via a Ultrabay sata-to-pata caddy to house something like a more future proof OCZ Vertex. Very impressive 88/65 read performance figures at 18MB/s 4kb reads shown in the caddy benchmarks. The ultrabay adapters use the same Marvell sata-to-pata chip as the ebay caddy benchmarked. T42 has a ICH4M PATA optical drive interface rated at 100MB/s read, 88.9MB/s write.
     
    User Retired 2, Nov 1, 2009
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  13. highlandsun

    highlandsun Notebook Evangelist

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    Wow nice, they also have a 256GB model. The largest PATA I could find before was 128GB...
     
    highlandsun, Nov 2, 2009
    #13