[SOLVED] is it a good idea putting a SSD in a IDE CD Drive?
- Thread starter Lil’bertz
- Start date
Solution
hang-the-9
Titan
- Mar 25, 2010
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Well the first thing, how are you going to put an SSD in a CD Drive? Or are you just talking about the spot in the case where the CD Drive would go? You would need an IDE to SATA adapter to use it. It should still be faster than a spinning drive, but it's a waste of time if the system only has IDE. Instead of buying an SSD better to buy a replacement computer. Used more modern ones you can find for under $100 with SATA ports.
- Oct 25, 2014
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i forgot to mention that this question is for laptop. my laptop has a cd drive that is using an IDE
- Mar 16, 2013
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- Oct 25, 2014
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thats why im asking. i knew it would be a waste if im going to put a drive that is faster than the interface.
- Mar 16, 2013
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Solandri
Illustrious
- Jan 4, 2012
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I used an eBay IDE to SATA adapter long, long ago to put a SATA SSD in a friend's computer with only IDE connectors.
1. It was very temperamental. While IDE and SATA are both ATA, most SSDs don't just rely on SATA. They also rely on AHCI which uses the SATA interface to communicate directly with the controller on the motherboard. That doesn't exist with an IDE interface. After about 6 hours of fiddling, I eventually got it to work, but...
2. No AHCI support meant no NCQ. NCQ allows the computer to send multiple file read/write request to the drive at once, instead of one at a time. It's important for SSDs because the drive is actually faster at reading/writing small files than the computer can send the request. That's why you may see SSDs with 30-100 MB/s 4k read/write speeds, but this increases to 200-300 MB/s with a QD (queue depth) of 16 or 32. NCQ is what enables the latter speeds. Without NCQ, you're stuck with the former speeds.
3. TRIM was also unavailable. It's not dependent on AHCI or SATA, so in theory should've worked over IDE. But the adapter itself seemed to interfere with TRIM commands. Or maybe Windows assumes only SATA drives would ever need trim. Whatever the reason, lack of TRIM means the OS cannot do garbage collection of deleted space, and performance would degrade after you wrote enough data to fill the drive (even if you deleted stuff). That said, newer SSDs are not as reliant on TRIM. They're programmed to recognize common filesystems, so can do TRIM independent of the OS. It would only be a problem if you're running some sort of RAID array, which it doesn't sound like you are.
4. Speed was considerably better than a HDD (note that the system was IDE/100 which maxes out at 100 MB/s). HDDs can usually hit 150 MB/s sequential speeds, so a SATA 3 SSD is only about 4x faster at sequential read/writes (about 5x compared to IDE/100). But HDDs absolutely suck at small file (4k) read/writes, typically scoring about 1 MB/s. Most SSDs can hit 30-100 MB/s 4k read/writes. So they're 30-100x faster with small files. So the vast majority of the speedup when switching to a SSD is due to the small file access speeds, not sequential. The small file 30-100 MB/s speeds of a SSD (without NCQ) are still within IDE/100's bandwidth limit, so you will see nearly the full benefit of using a SSD despite the slower interface.
Boot time dropped from about 4.5 minutes with a (very full and slow) HDD, to a little over 1 minute with the SSD. But overall, I would not do it again. Just too many headaches, and too much time spent trying to get it to work. You'd be better off putting the time into working a second job, so you can earn some extra money to buy a newer laptop.
1. It was very temperamental. While IDE and SATA are both ATA, most SSDs don't just rely on SATA. They also rely on AHCI which uses the SATA interface to communicate directly with the controller on the motherboard. That doesn't exist with an IDE interface. After about 6 hours of fiddling, I eventually got it to work, but...
2. No AHCI support meant no NCQ. NCQ allows the computer to send multiple file read/write request to the drive at once, instead of one at a time. It's important for SSDs because the drive is actually faster at reading/writing small files than the computer can send the request. That's why you may see SSDs with 30-100 MB/s 4k read/write speeds, but this increases to 200-300 MB/s with a QD (queue depth) of 16 or 32. NCQ is what enables the latter speeds. Without NCQ, you're stuck with the former speeds.
3. TRIM was also unavailable. It's not dependent on AHCI or SATA, so in theory should've worked over IDE. But the adapter itself seemed to interfere with TRIM commands. Or maybe Windows assumes only SATA drives would ever need trim. Whatever the reason, lack of TRIM means the OS cannot do garbage collection of deleted space, and performance would degrade after you wrote enough data to fill the drive (even if you deleted stuff). That said, newer SSDs are not as reliant on TRIM. They're programmed to recognize common filesystems, so can do TRIM independent of the OS. It would only be a problem if you're running some sort of RAID array, which it doesn't sound like you are.
4. Speed was considerably better than a HDD (note that the system was IDE/100 which maxes out at 100 MB/s). HDDs can usually hit 150 MB/s sequential speeds, so a SATA 3 SSD is only about 4x faster at sequential read/writes (about 5x compared to IDE/100). But HDDs absolutely suck at small file (4k) read/writes, typically scoring about 1 MB/s. Most SSDs can hit 30-100 MB/s 4k read/writes. So they're 30-100x faster with small files. So the vast majority of the speedup when switching to a SSD is due to the small file access speeds, not sequential. The small file 30-100 MB/s speeds of a SSD (without NCQ) are still within IDE/100's bandwidth limit, so you will see nearly the full benefit of using a SSD despite the slower interface.
Boot time dropped from about 4.5 minutes with a (very full and slow) HDD, to a little over 1 minute with the SSD. But overall, I would not do it again. Just too many headaches, and too much time spent trying to get it to work. You'd be better off putting the time into working a second job, so you can earn some extra money to buy a newer laptop.
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