SSD for old system... TRIM?

[hat]

I have a computer here, it's quite old... socket 775, but it's a 32 bit pentium 4 and it sports 1GB DDR 400. The main crappy thing about it though is the hard drive... it has that old hard drive whirring/humming sound... very slow too. I've seen SSDs breathe new life into systems even older than this so I was thinking I would get a small, cheap used SSD and chuck it in there and mess with it (maybe make it a game server).

The OS of choice would be a trimmed down XP 32 bit, since I feel 7 would be too heavy on the old system. Due to the age of the system, I'm not sure it would have hardware support for TRIM (doesn't the SSD need to support it, and the BIOS as well? this board being so old it might not even have ahci mode I'm not sure... not even 100% on if it has SATA at all). Does XP support TRIM? I think I remember something about needing a driver?

 

[newtekie1]

I think the only thing the motherboard has to support is ACHI. The rest is up to the operating system.

I'd put more RAM in it before spending money on an SSD though.

 

[hat]

The HDD is so bad I think an SSD is worth it. I mean an SSD just to have something decent, just like a 32-64GB one it could even be an older drive... something to chuck in there and make it bearable. I've seen side by side videos on youtube of the same computer, one with an SSD and one with an HDD and the difference was huge even with a 1.6GHz pentium 4 I think is what those computers were...

 

[eidairaman1]

The HDD is so bad I think an SSD is worth it. I mean an SSD just to have something decent, just like a 32-64GB one it could even be an older drive... something to chuck in there and make it bearable. I've seen side by side videos on youtube of the same computer, one with an SSD and one with an HDD and the difference was huge even with a 1.6GHz pentium 4 I think is what those computers were...

add more ram and an ssd. The drive and OS Have to support it. Windows 7 or greater

 

[Recca29]

I have a computer here, it's quite old... socket 775, but it's a 32 bit pentium 4 and it sports 1GB DDR 400. The main crappy thing about it though is the hard drive... it has that old hard drive whirring/humming sound... very slow too. I've seen SSDs breathe new life into systems even older than this so I was thinking I would get a small, cheap used SSD and chuck it in there and mess with it (maybe make it a game server).

The OS of choice would be a trimmed down XP 32 bit, since I feel 7 would be too heavy on the old system. Due to the age of the system, I'm not sure it would have hardware support for TRIM (doesn't the SSD need to support it, and the BIOS as well? this board being so old it might not even have ahci mode I'm not sure... not even 100% on if it has SATA at all). Does XP support TRIM? I think I remember something about needing a driver?

I highly dought you have sata ports on the motherboard.

can you post the processor model, motherboard chipset. if you don't remember just run cpuz.

 

[eidairaman1]

I highly dought you have sata ports on the motherboard.

can you post the processor model, motherboard chipset. if you don't remember just run cpuz.

sata ports came out during the skt 478/skt 462 era.

 

[Frick]

If you have cash to burn, otherwise get a healthy used HDD.

Or if you're being serious, toss it or sell it, mess with a VM instead. But I have come to hate old hardware laying around. It's all so useless.

 

[Recca29]

sata ports came out during the skt 478/skt 462 era.

I am not sure, thants why i asked for the motherboard model.

My friend had a 775 socket board with no sata port. dont remember the make and model though.

 

[Frick]

I am not sure, thants why i asked for the motherboard model.

My friend had a 775 socket board with no sata port. dont remember the make and model though.

That must have been a weird board. But strange things happened during that time. I still hate those systems. Like s423.

 

[Aquinus]

I am not sure, thants why i asked for the motherboard model.

My friend had a 775 socket board with no sata port. dont remember the make and model though.

That's weird. Every board I've bought since skt478 days (Northwood core,) has had SATA ports with the exception of cheap OEM machines like eMachine or Dell from 10 years ago.

Really as long as you have SATA, Windows 7 and AHCI is all you should need for TRIM to turn on and even if it didn't, the SSD would be worth while even without TRIM IMHO.

 

[95Viper]

Even without trim... Most have their own built in garbage cleanup routine.

Would a sata II 80 gig with a couple of hours on it for shipping help? PM me... It is just sitting on my desk.

 

[rtwjunkie]

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/SSD-Tool-free-space-trimmer/td-p/51198

I found this awhile back. Just run once each time PC is on. It works! It's called SSD Tool, and no installation required. It asks which drive is SSD, checks offset and you are finished. Close it, and it runs Trim in background until PC is shut down.

 

[ReadD8]

Assuming you really want to install Windows XP go for any Samsung model (or Intel ones, more expensive, though), mainly to the official app offered by Samsung to perform TRIM passes even if the installed Windows OS (XP, Server 2003 or Vista) doesn't support that command natively.

Personal experience: Samsung 830 given for free (a present) with more or less 600 GB already written, 128 GB model, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and a more or less modern mainboard which supports natively AHCI and whatnot. Installed nine months ago, 20 TB already written (I adquired the SSD in order to enjoy it and to enhance my experience [especially as temporary drive to create the biggest par2 files for protecting important files from silent corruption] using the computer, not to decorate the case) and no degradation of the performance.

Registry settings I would suggest for pre-Windows 7 OS. For Windows XP and vista, you can skip the Win32PrioritySeparation and LargeSystemCache values. Windows XP and Vista have as default values the proper ones for workstation use. And for Vista, SuperFetch should be disabled manually. The possible automatic defragmentation of drives implemented by Vista too.

To be saved as .reg file, not reg.txt and Unicode Little Endian with BOM format. Normal notedad.exe calls this Unicode.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00


[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"AutoEndTasks"="1"
"WaitToKillAppTimeout"="1000"


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction]
"Enable"="N"


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OptimalLayout]
"EnableAutoLayout"=dword:00000000


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control]
"WaitToKillServiceTimeout"="1000"


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\PriorityControl]
"Win32PrioritySeparation"=dword:00000026


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000000
"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000000
"PagingFiles"=hex(7):63,00,3a,00,5c,00,70,00,61,00,67,00,65,00,66,00,69,00,6c,\
00,65,00,2e,00,73,00,79,00,73,00,20,00,31,00,30,00,32,00,34,00,20,00,31,00,\
30,00,32,00,34,00,00,00,00,00


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
"EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000000

And the Performance Optimization tab offered by Samsung Magician, in order to run TRIM passes.

Important, extracted from the help file:

Q15. Why is Magician not detecting my SSD(s)?

A15. The Magician application may not detect SSDs properly when connected to RAID/SCSI storage controllers.

To sum up, if your SATA ports belongs to a 3rd party controller handled by SCSI miniport type driver (Silicon Image 3114 comes to mind), very likely Magician will fail to detect the installed Samsung SSD. At least a native SATA controller in IDE mode (integrated in the southbridge, not a 3rd party controller) supported by the standard PCI IDE controller is needed. While AHCI is a very nice addition for SSDs (due to NCQ, which enhances a lot the performance, for SSDs, of multiple and concurrent random little read/write requests), even without AHCI any more or less decent modern SSD will outperform for sure the rapidest HDD you can imagine in little multiple and concurrent random read/write queues.

If you can install Windows 7 and run the standard PCI IDE controller implemented by Windows 7, supposedly pciide.sys/intelide.sys do support passing TRIM commands, so no need of adquiring yes or yes a Samsung SSD (Intel SSDs offer a similar official app, too) for the cleaning app, because the TRIM commands are already supported natively by the OS.

P.S.: If you want to install Windows XP, Server 2003 or any pre-Vista with SP1 Windows OS, make sure the partitions are good aligned (for example, before than installing the Windows OS run any LiveCD/DVD/USB based on Linux which includes GParted to create a properly aligned partition and then DO NOT delete the partition itself in the install process, just choose to format it, a quick NTFS format). Otherwise performance will be sub-standard due to bad alignment. Partitioning that drive from a system running Windows 7 is another option.

 

[Jetster]

No trim with XP or the hardware but the firmware trash clean up will work. This is a great way to breath new life into a old system

 

[XL-R8R]

For the price of an SSD to "tickle" this old rig with new life; why not just sink the money into a used C2D setup with a more modern S775 board and DDR2 RAM?

I'm pretty sure it'd be a much more rewarding experience instead of flogging a dead horse... after all, the mentioned rig will struggle even with YouTube these days so it begs the question of why bother in the first place??

 

[Red_Machine]

It used to be true that you needed an OS that supported TRIM in order to use an SSD, but these days the software toolbox made by the manufacturer (such as Samsung's SSD Magician pictured above) have an analogue of TRIM built-in. Some SSDs even have it built into their firmware these days.

 

[Aquinus]

Most SSDs have a garbage collector in firmware though. TRIM usually doesn't actually free up the blocks itself IIRC, it marks them with a flag to be freed up which is handled by the GC and is done asynchronously when the SSD isn't doing something else. That's how I understood it to work, that TRIM compliments the GC, it doesn't replace it. As in, the effctiveness of the GC might be less without TRIM but it won't stop working because it doesn't have it.

 

[rtwjunkie]

That's why the SSd Tool I gave link to above works, it identifies in the background, so the drive's firmware knows what to delete.

 

[Shambles1980]

id honestly have to say that with 1gb of ram xp is going to struggle. and after updates it would be an absolute nightmare. id say about 2.5Gb ram is about the target for a reasonable xp 32 build.

 

[95Viper]

For those who want to get an understanding of the various aspects of SSD data cleanup and control... here is a nice simple explanation from Samsung.

Link here --> Understanding SSDs

Here is another from SuperTalent --> Sustaining SSD Performance

 

[hat]

I used to run a S478 3GHz P4 with 1GB ram way back when I first joined up here... with an XFX 6800XT I was able to play BF2, 2142 and the like without issue. If I could do that on even older hardware I'd imagine this thing would run acceptably with an SSD for day to day tasks, possibly hosting a server...

 

[Aquinus]

For those who want to get an understanding of the various aspects of SSD data cleanup and control... here is a nice simple explanation from Samsung.

Link here --> Understanding SSDs

Here is another from SuperTalent --> Sustaining SSD Performance

Thanks for the links and reaffirming what I had already said but with sources.
I've used a number of machines where TRIM never was enabled or couldn't be and it doesn't hurt that bad if the drive isn't filled to the brim or written to a lot.

 

[brandonwh64]

a 32gb or 64gb cheap ssd would be perfect for that machine and make it feel as snappy as a newer system.

 

[Aquinus]

a 32gb or 64gb cheap ssd would be perfect for that machine and make it feel as snappy as a newer system.

I just got a Corsair MX100 256GB off of Amazon for 100 USD for a machine I sold to someone, so 120-128GB must be a reasonable price, like 60-70 USD? The statement, "An SSD will make a slow machine (one with an HDD) fast," is very true, across the board, but I wouldn't want less than 240GB of storage.

 

[Shambles1980]

I used to run a S478 3GHz P4 with 1GB ram way back when I first joined up here... with an XFX 6800XT I was able to play BF2, 2142 and the like without issue. If I could do that on even older hardware I'd imagine this thing would run acceptably with an SSD for day to day tasks, possibly hosting a server...

what you remember from then and what it will be like for you now are two totaly different things lol..
I remember a 1ghz amd 3d now chip being rediculously fast with 512mb of ram and i loved it.
but i cant even use a lower end core 2 duo cpu now without having a rage fit.

I had an xp system here core 2 duo 2.5gb ram with a HD 6450. Its not so much the hardware thats the issue its xp is a bit of a resource hog. i had to install 7 x86 on it to make it useable. "its much quicker in every aspect"
although to be fair i did want the dxva features which i couldnt fully utilize in xp. "use it for a xbmc media center"
and if im brutally honest. 2.5gb was and is only just about enough system ram.
theres no point going over 3.5 with the gpu installed and not much ever was expected to use 3gb ram in xp era any way so you have to ad /3gb to your boot ini.
I dont doubt a ssd will make it faster. but your not doing it any justice without adding the ram as well.
If i had any spare id send it to you, unfortunatly i only have 1x 1gb ddr2 ocz platnum stick thats not installed any where. and thats pretty dead. systems wont boot with it as the only ram stick. so its just a waste of postage.