SSD in sata 1.0 system

[Davros]

Someone asked me to make their pc faster, (its a 3.0ghz pentium 4)
looking at it it's obvious its the Ide hdd thats slowing it down,
I havnt benchmarked it yet (cos its busy) but I recon the transfer rate will be much lower than the 80 is mb/s it should be capable of.
It does have 2 sata connections but as you know sata 2.0 hard drives had a jumper to put the drive in sata 1.0 mode I dont think a ssd will have this (is it needed)
So do you think a ssd will work ?

 

[orangpelupa]

Dunno, but I put an ssd into my laptop DVD drive bay and it works. It's a laptop from.... 2007-ish i think.

 

[digitalwanderer]

I'm assuming it's a slow HDD, not a 7200+ or anything? You might want to consider one of those hybrid drives since he won't see the full speed benefits of an SSD.

 

[Rikimaru]

Upgrading Pentium 4 is mostly useless endeavour.

If mb is LGA775 there are a lot of very cheap (like $10) core duo and quads.

You will see a difference with SSD on SATA1 because main thing which makes SSD fast compared to HDD are seek times.

 

[entity279]

I'd agree with you, in general use the single most significant upgrade would be towards an ssd. I think the fact that the mb supports an old sata standard is not deal - breaking. You'll still get the much faster response times.

Memory upgrade is also worth it, pentium 4 PCs I assume only get up to 2 GB of RAM, which is a diminutive amount today .

But for video consumption, youtube-ing and somewhat frequent web browsing, the CPU will still feel slow I imagine. And the ssd won't help here. So perhaps a cheap AM3 upgrade is in order.

Edit : wrong about AM3. If you switch mb you'd need something with a modern IGP to offload some video decoding. So it's either FM2 slots for 2M4C AMD APU or some Intel 1151.
On Intel socket you'd get only (Celeron & Pentium) dual cores for the cheap. I've used a Skylake 3Ghz Pentium for 6 months, it's a terrible experience. So I'd recommend at least higher clocks for this choice

 

[Davros]

update tested the transfer rate of the hdd it's 60mb/sec

You might want to consider one of those hybrid drives since he won't see the full speed benefits of an SSD.

Too expensive a 60gb ssd is £34.99

I think the fact that the mb supports an old sata standard is not deal - breaking.

it is if it doesnt work

 

[entity279]

it is if it doesnt work

Honest question - have you found a case of this not working on the internets? My 15 min search did not reveal any.

 

[Malo]

There's no reason why it shouldn't work technically. Even transfer speeds should be improved despite sata1. HDD transfer speeds vary greatly based on location on spindle whereas SSD is consistently fast.

One thing to check is whether the current installation is in AHCI mode. Will you be installing a new windows as well? If the current one is in IDE mode you will want to make sure the new one is in AHCI.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I'm assuming it's a slow HDD, not a 7200+ or anything? You might want to consider one of those hybrid drives since he won't see the full speed benefits of an SSD.

A good 7200 rpm HDD, i.e. 250GB or more would bring a meaningful improvement as well. Even a rather recent 500GB 5400 rpm laptop drive is rather fast (console hard drives)
I'll be way slower than SSD, but useful if it doesn't cost anything, free of worries about TRIM or possible issues with a low end, small SSD.

But for video consumption, youtube-ing and somewhat frequent web browsing, the CPU will still feel slow I imagine. And the ssd won't help here. So perhaps a cheap AM3 upgrade is in order.

Edit : wrong about AM3. If you switch mb you'd need something with a modern IGP to offload some video decoding. So it's either FM2 slots for 2M4C AMD APU or some Intel 1151.
On Intel socket you'd get only (Celeron & Pentium) dual cores for the cheap. I've used a Skylake 3Ghz Pentium for 6 months, it's a terrible experience. So I'd recommend at least higher clocks for this choice

It's 2017 and I make do with unaccelerated web video. It's a bit painful sometimes (linux with open source radeon driver)
With a fast CPU, performance still seems to depend on the graphics hardware even though anything from ATI Rage Pro onwards should be quite good for raw 2D in theory.. E.g. I see a Core 2 Duo E7500 with Intel graphics (G43 or something) working quite well, but a Q6600 with geforce 6100 (called 7100 there) seems to struggle with HTML5 video. That's weird.

Anyway, I wonder of the pertinence of getting a geforce GT610 or 710 for a 3GHz Pentium 4. If it has PCIe that is. Should work with even 1080p 60fps youtube, etc.
You get a super fast and stable graphics driver as well, reclaim a bit of memory capacity and performance if you were using integrated graphics.

My educated guess is software rendering of HTML5 video does stupid things, like software YUV to RGB conversion and software scaling, then pasting playback controls etc. on top. This hammers the CPU memory bandwith, and then the integrated graphics reads the result in system RAM to display it. So, perhaps a Pentium 4 with old integrated graphics or an old netbook will be able to read 720p H264 in VLC, but it will fail at full screen 360p youtube.
If you have a Pentium 4 with good RAM and a Radeon 9200 or such, perhaps it does 360 or 480p fine?

Web browser : try ublock origin (crap blocker with most efficient CPU/RAM usage), Firefox is good on low memory PCs too.

 

[Davros]

Honest question - have you found a case of this not working on the internets? My 15 min search did not reveal any.

Not with a ssd but it happened to me with a sata 2 drive and a sata1.0a motherboard,
Heres my post about it on b3d in 2011

Since we are talking about the need for a certain iq in the computer industry Im going to disagree
I think every hi tech company needs an average bloke give him the job title of "chief ass-clownery prevention officer"
The computer industry is legendary for making stupid decisions.

for example: sata2 drives :
As you know sata2 drives dont work in boards that have sata1 controllers (perfect example of ass-clownery from the people who came it with the sata2 specs)
Anyway most hdd companies dealt with this by having a jumper on the drive to set it to sata1 mode, simple enough.
Not for the ass-clowns at hitatchi, no the as-clowns there thought lets make a program to change the mode. So the if a user has a sata1 board they have to download and run a program.
No that would be too easy, they made it a bootable floppy image. Because everyone has a floppy drive dont they...
Does this program just change the sata mode oh no it does all kind of stuff like low level format so the inexperienced user has a chance to totally f***ing up his drive.
So the user downloads the image, installs a floppy drive, copies the image to a floppy disk, boots with it and changes the drive to sata1 mode
NO....
why not!
because sata2 drives dont work in sata1 boards so the program cant see the drive (ass-clownery at its finest)
The only people the program will work for is those who have sata2 boards and if they have sata2 boards they have no need of the stupid program would they....
Now if hitatchi had a chief ass-clownery prevention officer" he could of got a floppy drive, and when the guy proposed this idea he could have beat him about the head with it while screaming "you are a f***ing dickwad"

Someone else with the same problem
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/360835/sata-ii-hitachi-hd-in-15gbs-mode/

FROM WIKI
"SATA 1.5 Gbit/s, SATA 3 Gbit/s and SATA 6 Gbit/s

The designers of SATA aimed for backward and forward compatibility with future revisions of the SATA standard.[citation needed]

According to the hard drive manufacturer Maxtor, motherboard host controllers using the VIA and SIS chipsets VT8237, VT8237R, VT6420, VT6421L, SIS760, SIS964 found on the ECS 755-A2 manufactured in 2003, do not support SATA 3 Gbit/s drives. Additionally, these host controllers do not support SATA 3 Gbit/s optical disc drives. Users with a SATA 1.5 Gbit/s motherboard with one of the listed chipsets should either buy an ordinary SATA 1.5 Gbit/s hard disk, buy a SATA 3 Gbit/s hard disk switchable to 1.5 Gbit/s, or buy a PCI or PCI-E card to add full SATA 3 Gbit/s capability and compatibility.

To address interoperability problems many manufacturers allow to switch drives to the SATA1 mode. The largest hard drive manufacturer, Seagate/Maxtor, has added a user-accessible jumper-switch known as the Force 150, to switch between 1.5 Gbit/s and 3 Gbit/s operation. Western Digital uses a jumper setting called OPT1 Enabled to force 1.5 Gbit/s data transfer speed (OPT1 is used by putting the jumper on pins 5 & 6). Samsung drives can be switched to 1.5 Gbit/s mode by using software downloadable from the manufacturer website. This needs a SATA2 controller to use temporarily while programming the drive."

 

[Blazkowicz]

Does this program just change the sata mode oh no it does all kind of stuff like low level format so the inexperienced user has a chance to totally f***ing up his drive.
So the user downloads the image, installs a floppy drive, copies the image to a floppy disk, boots with it and changes the drive to sata1 mode
NO....
why not!
because sata2 drives dont work in sata1 boards so the program cant see the drive (ass-clownery at its finest)

That is perfectly fine computer logic
Get HP USB Storage Tool though, it allows to make a USB stick that boots MS-DOS. Extract the software from the floppy image and copy it to the USB stick. I doubt this won't work but you can also find means of booting a floppy image (USB stick with syslinux + memdisk, USB stick with another solution, network booting, burning a CD with booting glue (isolinux + memdisk?) and the floppy image)

 

[Davros]

The above post was from 2011, solved it when I changed motherboards
but I dont think a modern ssd would have such a program or jumper

 

[Blazkowicz]

Some stuff can be quite conservative. SSD perhaps not as much as you have lots of funny vendors and brands.

There's no reason why it shouldn't work technically. Even transfer speeds should be improved despite sata1. HDD transfer speeds vary greatly based on location on spindle whereas SSD is consistently fast.

Get a random old 320GB hard drive ; use the first 137GB or 128 GiB because of an old drive size limit on the motherboard. Fast rates lol.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

Eh, I'm confused.

Regardless of the drive being an SSD or not, whatever drive you put in there is going to be limited to SATA1 speeds, correct? So throughput is just going to be a maximum of 150MB/s regardless?

Do you have a SATA II SSD already but are worried about compatibility because of the lack of jumper? Because I don't think I'd recommend purchasing one for use in that system. I wouldn't think the cost would be worth it over some of your other options.

 

[Malo]

Regardless of the drive being an SSD or not, whatever drive you put in there is going to be limited to SATA1 speeds, correct? So throughput is just going to be a maximum of 150MB/s regardless?

Correct. With an SSD you'll get a sustained 150MB/s with much faster seek times. General use is about random read/writes, not about sustained anyway, and for large files it will still be 3-4 times faster than the old hard drive.

 

[Davros]

So throughput is just going to be a maximum of 150MB/s regardless?

better than the 60mbs he has at the moment

Do you have a SATA II SSD already

no

I wouldn't think the cost would be worth it over some of your other options.

£34.99

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Why spend so much time on reinstalling something with a p4 in it if you can buy a new laptop for under 200 pounds? I'm sure you could find a decent used laptop for around half that.

Even with a SSD it's still going to be dead slow.

Edit: like this
http://m.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-Latitu...RAM-Windows-7-Laptop-/351720691677?nav=SEARCH

Looks like you can even get a core 2 duo including shipping for 50.

 

[Malo]

I just realized we're discussing a Pentium 4, not even close to a modern Pentium.

I'm with @Rikimaru and @tongue_of_colicab on this sorry, no money should be spent on it at all.

 

[Davros]

He's decided to not take the risk that a ssd will work and live with what he's got,

 

[Albuquerque]

Despite this being "solved", I will say relay this anecdote: I dropped an old cheap OCZ Vertex 2e 120gb SATA3 SSD into a really old and really slow Dell Mini10v laptop two years ago as a Win10 eval build toy. To give some perspective on the rest of the PC: the original Atom N270, a single 2GB stick of DDR2 at like 333Mhz (operated at less), and whatever shoddy 945-series IGP thoes came with. Sad thing was, even when pent up at SATA 1 speeds, the SSD was remarkably faster than the entire rest of the computer. The boot process went from like two minutes to thirty seconds, of which all thirty seconds the CPU was absolutely pegged. In fact, even after getting to the desktop, the CPU was fully pegged for many seconds more.

Later production Win10 builds were much better with boot time and CPU usage, but ultimately the CPU was always the bottleneck. Web surfing was acceptable at best, YouTube was really only "usable" at like 360p resolution or less, and it was overall just a bad experience. I hadn't used it in a few years, so at one point I went back to the old spinner drive with Windows 7 "just to see..." Turns out, Win7 wasn't really any better.

Ultimately, the SSD did make the whole thing go measurably faster, but it was still too slow to be reasonable.