Using modern SSD on old system?

Hi guys,
I created that thread for the info which I am missing before buying "Toshiba THN-TR20Z2400U8" SSD drive. The product spec document says that the drive is compatible with Windows OSes down to Windows 7 but not lower. I have Windows Vista SP2 machine running fine with SATA 1.5 (SATA 1) mechanical drive configured in IDE emulation mode in BIOS which I cannot change to AHCI. As far as i have researched, almost all the SATA 3 SSD drives are backwards compatible and should work with older SATA interfaces just fine, including in non-AHCI configurations such as when emulated as IDE.

Can i use that SSD on Vista SP2 using the current system configuration?

I also wonder "why" and whether OCZ SSD UTILITY can be installed and work on OSes older than Windows 7, such as on my Vista SP2 which is missing TRIM command natively like XP. Documentation says Windows 7 as the minimum supported OS, but I am not sure.

I wonder the answers of these 2 questions above.

To sum up;
1) Can i use that SSD on IDE emulated machine with SATA 1 port?

2) Can I, or how can I use Ocz SSD Utility on Vista OS?

Best regards.

 

Is this going to be an extra drive or are you planning to boot off it? Unfortunately, I am not 100%, but do believe the older mode should still work, but without AHCI, your overall performance may be an issue. Also, you should investigate what services / tasks you have running for Vista. For example, you don't want something to automatically go out and run constant defragmentation routines on this new drive. There may be other Vista indexing / services you may need to shut off as well.

What are you wanting to use the Toshiba/OCZ SSD Utility to do? In other words, is there a different way to do what you want without the utility? Also, you bring up a good point with TRIM. I cannot speak about the particular drive in question, but SSDs usually run their own garbage collection routines if the system is left logged out and idle for a few hours (meaning there is no disk activity for a long period of time). This garbage collection cleans out those 'dirty' but empty cells that would normally be done with TRIM. You would need to find out if that is the case with this particular drive you wish to purchase.

 

Hi mate, and many thanks for your detailed reply.
It will be the main and only drive that i'd like to boot from just like my current mechanical SATA drive, with only one partition, mostly i'll do basic tasks like browsing, office stuff and sometimes multimedia. It's modestly labeled 60 TBW endurance life and it's really low-cost and reputable brand without any brief issues as far as when I read reviews and comments, that's why my choice. 60 TBW is quite low but it's way far away than my daily usage even for many years in long-term manner.

Also, yes i'm aware of the optimizations that I should take care such as disabling defrag/prefetch/search indexing etc, which I don't use them at all. I just expect to get some "very" notable speed up after replacing 10-year-old existing mechanic 4200 rpm stock harddrive without losing any I/O stability.

The only thing that Vista lacks of TRIM and Toshiba OCZ's proprietary OCZ SSD Utility software is told to be only supported in Windows 7 and above, but not lower. Hence, built-in Idle Time Garbage Collection function "would" work without any software in some cases but I'm not hopeful for it as Windows almost never leaves drive alone when turned on eventhough you disable defrag/indexing/prefetch services you know. Regarding to OCZ SSD Utility, it is supposed to perform drive optimizations such as manually TRIMming the drive regardless of OS, and monitoring drive health, as well as firmware upgrades when required (I hate upgrading firmware which is really dangareous task, yuk!).

Honestly, I just want to know whether it would be stable and faster than current configuration without caring TRIM / garbage collection leaving the system in its own ecosystem with having daily and non-instensive usage while connected to Sata 1 port in IDE mode. The notebook is itself Toshiba Satellite with AMD processor and only supports IDE, not AHCI

I appreciate for more comments,

Cheers.

 

One thing you may try, but with a laptop may be a PITA, is to leave the power on the drive and just disconnect the data cable. You would have to check your cabling, but I know in my old Clevo, it was a combined cable (for both sata data/power), so I don't think I could power on the drive without the data cable connected. The other ideas would be to try booting into your BIOS and let it sit there for hours or if you have a bootable optical drive, possibly create a Windows Rescue disc or something like a memtest bootable disc and then boot to that and let it sit idle.

Best of luck!

 

Hey! I think you misposted your last message here as your post totally irrelevant to my thread

 

No. The post is correct.

If you do go with it and Vista, I'm just thinking of ways you can get power to the SSD, but not actually go into Windows so garbage collection kicks in. One way would be to disconnect the data cable, and just power on the machine. Another way would be to create some other boot disk (that is not Windows on that SSD), and boot into that -> this method would still get power to the SSD so it could do its garbage collection, but not be active with the installation of Windows.

Hope that makes sense.

 

@kimiraikkonen you can just overprovision more, like people who ran SSDs without TRIM (e.g. in RAID) done since the time immemorial. Leave 25-35% of drive's capacity unprovisioned instead of usual 10-20%, and forget about it - with much more room for garbage collection, it'll manage.

I'd also suggest trying to install 10 or at least 8.1 on the machine, older machines are usually snappier under newer OS'es - but on the other hand you'll likely spend quite some time messing with drivers.

 

Let me ask you one thing at this point. As far as I know many SSDs are now shipped with pre-overprovisioned structure like you see 480 GB available space for a 512 GB-sized drive actually. So do we still manually leave "additional" free space or leave some unallocated/unpartitioned piece of space to make SSD perform better? I am asking this in broad manner, not just by Vista/XP's perspective though.

Some utilities like Samsung Magician are also providing such operation interactively by prompting user, that is another confusion.

I thought overprovisioning was seamless and was managed built-in like garbage collection nowadays...But many tutorials still recommend leaving about %25 empty space even on a formatted active partition.

I beleive that deserves some clarification more.

Thanks a lot.

 

@kimiraikkonen SSD have always been shipping with some factory overprovisioning, to my knowledge. However, even with TRIM, that is usually not enough. Without TRIM, you need to OP even more, to compensate. Of course, this is all opinion-based.

I personally overprovision my drives to 200.1GB formatted for every 240/256GB/whatever manufacturer drive capacity (that is measured in billions of bytes, not 1024^3). Hardcore enterprise drives are OP'd to 200GB manufacturer capacity (186GB-something formatted) - that's what I'd stick to if I were to run drives without TRIM.

I never used SSDs without TRIM for any prolonged time, however read a lot about it because I was going to RAID them. Ended up getting a single larger SSD, never looked back.

 

I haven't kept up with the latest and greatest SSDs due to not needing a hardware refresh yet, but back when I was looking into it. It was my impression that modern SSDs were designed with TRIM in mind and that any recent SSD will have a controller that assumes the OS has TRIM. I do remember there being some with pretty aggressive garbage collection back in the early 2010s that were suggested to use with older OS'es.

This article is fairly old by tech standards, but should still be relevant: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/201...garbage-collection-so-i-dont-need-trim-right/. Ars in general has been a good source of information for me.

As for manufacturer utilities, I would suggest you look into how exactly, their garbage collection and/or optimize functions work. Some may be relying on TRIM for part of what they do.

 

I don't know if that statement is true or not, as I don't believe SSD manufacturers limit the drive to a single operating system. For example, Linux distro's come with varying support of how TRIM is used. From https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Solid_state_drive :

Where 'Continuous TRIM' would be the equivalent of how Windows does a TRIM on the delete of every file.