Pata Ssd?

I've been nosing around looking for a PATA SSD for an old IBM Thinkpad X20 that is actually still running...even usable with XP, if it wasn't for the slow 20 GB HDD. So far I've only found 2 PATA SSDs, one by Transcend (unknown controller, doesn't seem to work well with XP), and one by OWC (which is SandForce and seems to be Mac oriented). I realize there probably isn't a huge booming market for the things but does anyone know of any other options? Kind of like to keep this thing going, it's handy for some games that don't cooperate with Win7 or work on a VM.

 

How about this? Seems to be on the cheap side and offers 64gb lol.

http://www.amazon.com/KingSpec-Solid-State-SM2235-Controller/dp/B00474L18U

I salute you for your commitment to the classics sir lol.

 

Hmm, looks interesting. Hope the GC is up to snuff, since their website isn't very informative. Guess I'm gonna find out.

 

You may want to peruse http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...orage/531052-1-8-zif-pata-ssds-available.html .

For 2.5" PATA SSDs recommend the Renice E7 (EWS720) for lowest power consumption. The Runcore ProIV (Indilinx + stp) or OWC (Sandforce + stp) are the highest performing units with TRIM support.

 

I thought xp didn't support trim?

 

It doesn't, but probably nice to know if there is the slimmest, slimmest of chances a Win 7/ Mac OS X 10.7 is in the future.

 

XP and Vista don't support TRIM. Only 7 and OS X with certain Apple SSDs support TRIM. TBH TRIM support isn't all that important. My RAID 0 array is just as fast without TRIM, and it's been 2 months with no issues. My X25-M Gen 1 Intel SSD doesn't support TRIM, the controller deals with GC automatically.

I would avoid Kingspec, they generally don't tend to be reliable. See if you can find an old school Intel or Samsung PATA ZIF SSD, or you could get a 2.5" PATA to SLC CF adapter.

 

I don't think you'll encounter a write amplification problem until you've written and then deleted the entire capacity a couple of times. Do you think you've written 350+ GB to the volume yet?

 

The Indilinx solutions have a wiper.exe you can be run periodically to sent TRIM commands to the SSD to maintain write performance. Without such an exe can do a Tony Trim which writes 0xFF to empty blocks so GC can do the maintenance as background task.

 

have a look at this: MyDigitalSSD 128GB Bullet Proof 44-Pin PATA IDE 2.5 Inch SSD | My Digital Discount

 

Given my usage patterns (5-6 GB in writes a day, somedays I don't even use my Alienware), it'll take me like 6-7 months to hit that many writes. But my point was the old school Intel and Samsung SSDs that didn't support TRIM had GC commands in the controller that dealt with GC.

 

And the later generation drives also have GC -> that is it wasn't really removed from these drives.

The point of my original post was that this quote doesn't mean anything just yet, "My RAID 0 array is just as fast without TRIM, and it's been 2 months with no issues."

Since you haven't even started to fill it up, there will be plenty of free NAND cells to distribute writes (and frees), so of course it is just as fast w/ out TRIM. In fact it will be faster when you do any kind of DELETE operation. You only hit the write amplification problem once your NAND cells have had data written to them, and are in a "dirty" but empty state. Only at this point will you hit a small performance with WRITE operations as the NAND cells would need to be cleared before they can be written.