Transcend Has a PATA SSD For Your Aging PC

[ProDigit10]

Nice,
XP and Win 98 have less background clutter/activity. Trim is less of a necessity there.

 

[Stardude82]

[citation][nom]spaceinvaderx[/nom]When did people start calling IDE PATA?[/citation]

ATA was the industry standard name for IDE which was a WD proprietary format originally. Then in 03' SATA came out and ATA became PATA retroactively.

 

[Guest]

seriously? if you have enough for an ssd why dont you upgrade the whole system? if your system only supports pata then it's suppose to be obsolete

 

[ianj14]

I'm currently browsing this page on an aged laptop from 2006! It's running W7 though, and quite stable with it. I only use it for browsing, email, and the occasional office document, so it's not exactly stretched. The only thing I wouldn't mind is for it to be a bit faster in the HDD department when it comes to read performance. If the price of the 64GB or 128GB drives is below 100 GBP, then it might be worth upgrading this laptop. If the prices of the larger drives are in the 150-200 GBP mark or more, then it just wouldn't be worth it and like others have said, better to get a new laptop.

 

[zooted]

Isn't the maximum bandwidth for ide/pata around 100/130 mb/s? Doesn't that seem to defeat the purpose?

 

[gilbertfh]

PATA SSD's... Helping users reach bottlenecks in record time!

 

[chaz_music]

This is great for an older laptop, especially the lower power draw. Did Transcend think ahead and implement these SSDs with 512 byte blocks? Machines that use PATA are also typically running XP, and with older bios as well. Both of these are going to have problems with the larger 4K blocks that most SSDs utilize.

This upgrade path needs to have as little problems possible for it to be useful, as well as minimal extra cost (no OS upgrade, etc.). Otherwise, like the other comments, it appears to me that it is better to upgrade the system as a whole (OS, MB, CPU, mem, and SSD).

 

[kyuuketsuki]

[citation][nom]zooted[/nom]Isn't the maximum bandwidth for ide/pata around 100/130 mb/s? Doesn't that seem to defeat the purpose?[/citation]
No, it doesn't. The "purpose" of SSDs isn't their sequential read/write speeds, that's merely a nice bonus. What really makes SSDs far superior to HDDs are their low (pratcially non-existent) seek times and random read/write speeds that are in a whole 'nother stratosphere compared to HDDs.

 

[f-14]

upgrading some machines requires all new software because the new hardware doesn't work on 98/xp and the new software is quite expensive, thousands of dollars expensive esp. for businesses where it amounts to tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
remember the halo 2 debacle?

 

[dlpatague]

If the price were right I would consider buying this. I still have a IBM ThinkPad T30 that I use all the time for simple jobs like at school in my computer networking lab, office applications, and just general web browsing. It runs Windows 7 just fine as is. But the important thing would be the random access times especially at the lower I/Os that you would typically be at on an older laptop doing general computing. The throughput isn't as important in my opinion for a product like this.

 

[aicom]

Remember that it's not about the sequential reads/writes for everyday performance. The majority of the benefit is the random read/write improvement (even the fastest consumer SSDs hardly saturate PATA in random I/O). In that light, a PATA SSD doesn't look as bad. It is certainly a niche product (POS, old systems, and such as people said above) but it will add some more life into an old system.

 

[SuperVeloce]

[citation][nom]Stardude82[/nom]ATA was the industry standard name for IDE which was a WD proprietary format originally. Then in 03' SATA came out and ATA became PATA retroactively.[/citation]
indeed. Because it's Parallel, opposed to Serial.

 

[SuperVeloce]

[citation][nom]zooted[/nom]Isn't the maximum bandwidth for ide/pata around 100/130 mb/s? Doesn't that seem to defeat the purpose?[/citation]
No! Why? Because the real strenght of SSD is in r/w of very small files. HDD's go into kilobytes/second, when disk head is jumping around to locate very small files. As Sheldon would say, it's only logical...

 

[_zxzxzx_]

Wow! This would've been great for my K6-2 sytem!