COMPACT FLASH or hard drive for my old laptop

[Kaitlin Kaschak]

ok so recently i scored an old compaq laptop for 10$ at a used thrift store i was able to test it at the store before buying it and it works. it came with a 4 gig IDE hard drive a pentium 1 cpu and windows 98se on it. my question is since i want to upgrade to higher storage capacity would i be better off sourcing out an IDE laptop hard drive off ebay or would i be better off using a compact flash to ide adapter as well as a CF card also what size ide and or CF should i use i.e. how many gigs is minimum

 

[molletts]

You can use a CF card (I use one in my ThinkPad X40 which came with a non-standard IBM 1.8" hard drive) but you will probably find that it "pauses" for periods of a second or two while it reallocates blocks - CF cards don't have the high-performance flash memory controllers that allow SSDs to do this in the background. On the plus side, its random read performance is much higher than a conventional hard drive (after the upgrade, my laptop booted faster than my workstation which had 3 x 15,000rpm SCSI hard drives at the time - needless to say, I upgraded that to a "real" SSD pretty soon afterwards) and the laptop's processor may be so slow that the "pauses" don't really notice anyway.

The issue you're most likely to encounter with such an old machine is the various hard drive capacity limitations they had, which resulted from the different stages of evolution of the IDE/ATA protocol. You may find that the BIOS will not recognise drives bigger than 8.4GB. If you're lucky, and the BIOS programmers were forward-looking, it may allow drives up to 40GB. I doubt it would support drives bigger than that, either up to the 137GB limit or beyond it.