SSD Options for IDE/PATA Only Systems Such as CF-51

A good point made earlier regarding the adapters....if you buy a $4.00 adapter from China, are the one's that look the same but 5x the cost, the same item with a sellers mark-up or are they the one's that conform to a quality control procedure?

They all have the "QC Passed" sticker on them, but the sticker cost $0.02, so you can only get so much Jam with the remaining $3.98.

 

How does a 1.8" IDE ZIF-- SSD compare to all of this? I just picked up a refurbished 32gb for less than $30. It includes the caddy with PCB to fit in a 2.5 sata drive caddy. It is an OEM Dell product so I imagine it is all bootable on sata anyway.
Not that my plans include booting from it, but it should be bootable as a main drive, or hook up the 1.8 to a usb adapter. I wonder if it will boot on usb?
My plans are a 2nd internal SSD.
I figure a IDE SSD would be more compatible in a cf29. The 1.8 ZIF drives don't seem that expensive. It sure would avoid converting from SATA to IDE.
The ZIF to 44pin adapters are flat and "should "fit in a cf29 caddy much better than the SATA to IDE.

 

When I was buying those adapters, I purchased USA and China....They are same, same
Failure rate did not matter where I bought it from.

 

I recall forum member "theoak2" travelling that road....half a recollection that he used a Renice drive that Nando4 recommended. I think they are a native Pata drive so the power consumption & heat load are lower than a native Sata drive with a Sata-Pata translation adapter.

I'm not sure if he posted any results other than....wow it's great.

 

Details, details, my take on this is that if the drive uses a modern SandForce controller,
either the Sandforce has an IDE interface or they provided an IDE to SATA chip onboard.
Then those are probably numbers put there by marketing who just said SandForce can
do this and they just copied the numbers. Perhaps they can burst at those rates to from
the cache, who knows?
A good friend of mine who worked at Intel said the only thing we guarantee about our MIPS
numbers is that you will never get a higher one than what we publish, lol!
Edit: Just noticed the ** note on that page that says specifications provided by SandForce.

 

I was wrong previously where I thought that AHCI is not needed for TRIM support in Win 7,
it is required:
SSD Tips and Tweaks | OCZ Technology

I've seen several other comments about it being required for TRIM support.
I mentioned a hack for the ICH7M to support AHCI and remember seeing a link to it in a
Wiki article, but I can't seem to find it, and reports here are that the Jmicron adapter also
does not support it.

Also found this comment by gan on the Lenovo forum: "To enable trim in Windows 7 you need to use the Microsoft AHCI driver or the Intel RST 9.6 driver (or newer). Intel RST older than 9.6 do not support trim."

 

I'd be very interested in the aforementioned hack myself...got at least two machines that would severely benefit from it...

Let me check something and I'll be back...

 

WARNING, many say that changing the SATA mode in the BIOS setup will wipe out the
drive, unless you follow one of the hacks in exactly the right way - backup first if anyone
tries this!
This is for 32 bit XP by the way:
This was not the exact page for the AHCI hack and this procedure seems to have a bug
where it says to skip to step 8 for ICH7M yet the steps in between state what to change
for ICH7M. But the general idea is given:
Enable AHCI on Intel chipsets - Neowin Forums

I'm not sure if this will work if there is no BIOS support for SATA AHCI mode, obviously
the CF-51 does not have it since there is no SATA interface.

Also, I started another thread here stating that the ICH7M has SATA interfaces (2) and that
there was probably an adapter chip on the CF-51 motherboard as was done with some
Thinkpads of the same timeframe. However, I forgot that ICH7 also has IDE interfaces, probably
for the optical drives of that time, so I don't see why the adapter chip is required. I should take
a look at the block diagrams in the repair manual.

Procedure for Win7 and Vista - use at your own risk and you'll need hacked drivers if the
chipset does not officially support it:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/61869-ahci-enable-windows-7-vista.html?filter[2]=Performance%20Maintenance

Another long discussion regarding XP, note the last post about Intel's latest drivers:
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/109...se-closed-read-second-last-post/page__st__240

 

What type of system? Do you have SATA AHCI option in the BIOS?
Perhaps we should start a new thread on this.

 

A custom, SATA-modded ThinkPad T43p, you can see it here:

forum.thinkpads.com • The final mod on my "ultimate" T43p: AFFS LED LCD *huge* PIC

We most likely should...and no, there isn't an option of enabling AHCI in BIOS since the machine was originally equipped with a PATA drive, as well as with the blasted SATA-to-PATA converter chip onboard...

 

Some good years ago, the early SATA SSDs were just PATA SSD's with an internal IDE/SATA controller.
That's why they weren't really show much difference to the old ones.
I'm pretty sure this Sandforce controller was built with a native SATA interface.

the Sandforce controller may well be capable of that speed, but as all that throughput has to go through an
SATA->IDE interface controller, even with the max IDE spec of UltraDMA133 (UDMA-6), its bottleneck will be a max (theoretical) 133MB/s.
Cut 10-20% overhead and you get 120-106MB/s.
If the 50.000 IOPS at 4KB would be QD=1 (since there is no NCQ in IDE), that would also be cut in half.
Still, compared to any HDD, it would be a HUGE increase in Random reads/writes, and a significant (4x) boost
in sequential rates.

P.S. I'm not sure how well a Jmicron, or Marvel IDE-SATA "bridge" handles this congestion (fast SATA reads -> slow IDE passthru).

 

I don't think that the hack gets around the BIOS issue, rather it enables AHCI on Southbridges
that have the capability in hardware but have it disabled in the driver for marketing reasons.
Is there a Middleton BIOS for the T43? I think he did the AHCI BIOS mod for the T60/T61.

Oh cool! So that was you who did the SATA mod, I have a feeling that it could be done to the CF-51 also.

 

The way I understand this one the answer is....Yes & No.

Native support in Win7....the OS sends the Trim command to a drive whose firmware & controller support the command, so you need to be in AHCI mode.

I would assume from the link that the OCZ ssd tool box is as poor as everything else OCZ produce for the following reason:

From Intel Community Support Pages....you can use manual or scheduled Trim in IDE Mode on XP, Vista & Win7 from the Intel toolbox if that is more convenient.

There was no hint by the OCZ forum that there tool box supports the manual command.

I'll have a guess....Slow compared to Sata....Fast compared to Pata.

Corsair F120 (Sata-II) in a CF-29Mk4 with a 3 bux adapter....not sure how long it lasted though.

I'm not sure on this....it may allow you to hit the Bios restriction earlier than usual so the Bios steps down the cpu earlier than it normally would....but that's a guess....no cooking bacon & eggs on this baby.

 

I've just looked at both of my SATA-modded T43 units and neither has AHCI enabled...not in XP, not in W7.

No. Neither Middleton nor Zender ever touched the T43 BIOS. There is a modded BIOS available, but it deals with other stuff (eliminating the "2010 error" on boot, allowing non-whitelisted cards...) but does nothing about the AHCI...

I don't know the structure of CF-51 well enough, although I've owned several of them. Do they have an onboard SATA-to-PATA converter chip like T43 does?

 

I've not looked in depth to see exactly what is going on with the CF-51. I know
that it uses ICH7M which has SATA ports, other than that I have to dig deeper.

I wanted to add a link to this post where a Marvell based board is added to a
desktop motherboard in order to provide AHCI support. I'd guess that the add
in board has its own extension to the BIOS to support the features. This does
not apply obviously since the board cannot be added to a laptop:
Is AHCI important enough for a new SSD to warrant buying a new MOBO? - ssd - Storage

 

Conflicting information, it is stated several times in this thread that AHCI is
NOT required for TRIM in Windows 7:
Setting Question TRIM in W7 = AHCI?

See post #8 by Tony, OCZ staff and confirmed by Wendy in post #10.
Another poster there stated that Wendy tests SSDs at CD Freaks but it seems
that the site has changed ownership and become SSD Freaks. I was unable to
find any reviews by Wendy but it might be of some use:
http://www.ssdfreaks.com/content/54/ssd-tips-tricks-choosing-the-right-ssd

Seems I have to do some testing regarding TRIM in IDE mode.

 

About a week ago when I was doing CPU temperature tests I was also concerned about
the SSD temperature and decided to run the HDtune "Error Scan" without using the "Quick
Scan" option. I started it watching the temp, and the phone rang with an important call so
I closed the lid on the laptop to put it into sleep mode. Forgot about it and opened it hours
later and got a pop up warning that the disk temp was 128 deg C!!! It was very late at night
and I thought this can't be right and just shut it down.

I ran the same HDtune scan again today watching it the entire time. It started with an SSD
temp of 32 deg C and ended just touching 50 deg C. Then I had to go do something so I
closed the lid again, and got the 128 deg C pop up again when I opened the lid. It clearly
was not at that temp, just a hardware glitch coming out of sleep mode.

50 deg C is not bad, however it would be easy to start at 40 deg C, and with a higher ambient
on a hot summer day I would not be surprised if it gets to 60 deg C. I'd like to improve the
heat transfer to the metal lid on the caddy. The version of the Toshiba SSD that I used is open
frame so there is no metal case to act as a heat spreader.

 

Yes conflicting....considering they are discussing a specific controller (Indilinx) you would have thought that a single page were sufficient to say....Revision 1.3* passes the TRIM command in AHCI only (with the correct drivers), Revision 1.40 passes the TRIM command in AHCI & IDE (with the correct drivers) & Revision 1.41 is GC only, NO TRIM support.

What are the chances that manufacturers have released new drives supporting TRIM when a Firmware Revision could have been written for an existing drive.

We need a "TRIM expert" to chime in....I'm still saying the answer to your question is Yes & No.

 

I think all adapters have attributes that can either be an annoyance or outright detrimental to what you are trying to achieve. The most common being, they draw the same power overhead even when the drive is in low-power standby & resume from sleep I/O errors.

Here's a challenge....take the best attributes from a Marvell, Sunplus & JMicrom & design your own.

 

What software were you using to test your SSD? AS SSD is a punishing software. Try ATTO and/or Crystal Disk Mark. In addition, I think your motherboard/chipset 7xx, could also have an adverse effect on your SSD - and the ability to TRIM properly.

 

I posted HDTune results in post #23 and Crystal Disk Mark in #28. I have also run AS SSD with similar results. I do plan to run ATTO soon.
The chipset is a 945 variety with ICH7M Southbridge.

We have conflicting info as to TRIM compatibility. I am now thinking of staying with Win XP in which case TRIM support is a mute point. The Toshiba drive that I chose is a later type with good garbage cleanup as I understand it, so I'm not worried about it at this time. I do not know of a cleanup tool for the Toshiba drives and I would lean toward a Samsung or Intel next time. Other than this I like the Toshiba.

 

Considering the Pata/IDE Interface & translation chip, the performance of the Toshiba drive is not bad.

Things could be worse....a "once in a lifetime deal" could turn out to be a CLONE DRIVE.

KingFast Unknowingly Sends Counterfeit SSD With Fake Memory For Review | The SSD Review

 

I've worked in the business of identifying counterfeit parts so that is an interesting article,
however, as I read it, the title is wrong. I would call a counterfeit SSD one entirely made
by another company, it simply had some counterfeit parts. This is a huge industry and
problem. All sorts of parts are being counterfeited, some even made it into military fighter
jets:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocent...ious-risks-from-counterfeit-electronic-parts/

I'm impressed that KingFast uses Intel memory and did so much to correct the issue with
those SSDs.

 

I got the email from Les Tokar yesterday about the KingFast SSD...that was a very good read and it was nice to see they recalled them and got them off the market fast.

 

Left it in the car for about 6 hours where temps were in the low 30s, brought it in
and it would not boot. Took about 4 tries booting to warm it up, then it worked.
CMOS logic is faster at cold temps so this indicates a hold time problem
somewhere in the design. I have much more faith in Intel and Toshiba so the
logical culprit is the adapter. I'm going to buy the more expensive version from
MicroSataCables that looks to be the exact same one but lets hope there is
more quality control involved. I might also ask over at the Thinkpad forum to
see if anyone has tried the Adapter at low temp.

 

Yes....good show KingFast, I hope that type of action enhances their reputation.

As said before....there is never any feedback other than Wow, it's fast.

Fair play to you for updating the thread....If at first you don't succed.....

 

I was hoping that by doing the research this would just "work" since I didn't want it
to turn into a project. I can live with the temp issue since I don't use it cold, not really
a problem but it does not give me much confidence in the adapter design.

While it was fairly obvious that this system had an SSD, it shuts down REAL fast, and
apps open fast, it just feels sluggish as I described here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/panasonic/709806-cf-51-mk3-xp-sp3-feels-sluggish.html

I finally decided to check the SSD speed and it showed only 50 MB/sec but I could not
believe that the drive was showing garbage issues already. I deleted IE8 cookies and temp
files then ran TFC and it is back to normal .... strange.

I did a full image backup of XP so that I can go back to it, and then loaded Win 7 Pro 32 bit
and this feels much better, right for a 2G C2D. The install was easy, I like it so far.

 

I am really liking Win 7, actually loving Win 7 on this system! But the boot timing is
probably different than XP and it is a bit more sensitive to temperature at boot time (when
it is cold). I tried the more expensive version of the card shown here on ebay, about $15
shipped:
IDE 44 Pin to 1 8" Micro SATA Adapter | eBay

It is even worse! LOL! It will not boot from cold at room temp. Not a huge issue, try to boot,
fail, leave it on for 30 sec, reboot and it works everytime. Still not a very confident feeling. I'm
going back to the cheaper one which has exactly the same model and revision number as
the more expensive one. Might be worth buying 5 or more of these to find the best one, they
are so inexpensive from the lower cost supplier.
While I have debugged many hardware timing issues, I really dislike hardware that has them.
But now, spoiled by the SSD, there is no way I could go back to a mechanical drive.

 

Went back to the less expensive adapter and decided to try adding a sort
of shield to the flat flex cable. I simply folded a piece of aluminum foil so
that it covered both sides of the flex cable. This actually adds a very small
amount of capacitance to all of the signal lines, it can also improve the
signal quality by lowering the characteristic impedance of the lines. I was
not expecting much but it worked, it now boots at room temp, even after
sitting outside in 40 deg weather. The clue was that the adapter seems to
work fine in older IBM laptops so it is probably something in the implementation
of the CF-51. I did not even ground the shield.

 

cool (no pun intended ). could this be one of the reasons the WiFi slot in my C1 has some black adhesive foil over the wifi adapter ?

 

It is possible, but it is probably there to reduce radiated RF and keep it on the antennas instead.

 

This setup has been working perfectly ever since I added the foil shield - I like it!

 

Transcend *PSD320 are pata, There are others called "Kingspec" (I don't know that brand) too.

 

I've been so busy using this system that I forgot to work on figuring out if TRIM is enabled, then
I recently came across this command line query to test for TRIM in Win7:
fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

It returns a 0 indicating that Win7 has TRIM enabled. As I expected the chipset, AHCI, and
conversions from PATA to SATA have no impact on TRIM. The SSD drive supports it, and
Win7 therefore has it enabled.

 

I ran AS SSD to determine the access times for this SSD: .289 ms Read and .403 ms Write.
The latest SSDs from Samsung are far better but even so this drive is 20 to 40 times better on
access time than even the best mechanical drives.

 

Still running the 1.8" 128 GB HG3 Toshiba SSD with a low cost SATA to IDE adapter
and it is working perfectly with the shield over the ribbon cable. Thinking that the CF-51
is semi rugged I got into the bad habit of picking it up by the display lid and cracked it.
This is the only problem that I've had and this laptop is my favorite mainly because of
the display. I'm going to start a new thread with some questions about the display.

 

The fact the aluminum foil trick worked is good news.

 

I've not changed the system other than to use it daily and load more software and it feels slower so I decided to run Crystal Diskmark3 again. The results are essentially the same as when I ran it back in Jan of 2013, see post #27 in this thread. I'll assume for now that it is the usual windows slow down with more software installed:

 

That is my guess too but also you can pick up a lot of junk on the internet. Maybe it's time to do some house keeping :yes: .Like anything if you have it for a while and use it every day it might feel slower (as you said) but really not as your test showed. It's just you...this is what a IT guy at work told me once. What I did was dump the hdd and reloaded windows....felt like a new laptop

 

If you're afraid or too lazy to re load the whole drive, (I'm too lazy) (it ain't broke so I'm not gonna fix it)

Download CCLEANER and run it at least once a month. https://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER
https://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER

Download MBAM and run it at least once a month. https://www.malwarebytes.org/
https://www.malwarebytes.org

 

Thanks I've been using those for a long time.
I also like TFC that gets a few more files than CCleaner and is quicker to run:
TFC Download

I've also been following the tips here in the 3rd post to run TDSkiller and HitmanPro on a few systems but mine don't usually have any major issues:
Rootkit "unable to fix" hooks - Trend Community

 

I like that CCleaner also cleans the registry. I'll check out TFC

 

It seems that 1.8" SATA drives such as the one that I used in this thread are becoming less common.
But many if not most mainstream SATA SSDs are also available in mSATA format. Here is a thread
discussing mSATA to IDE adapters based on (probably) better chips than the adapter that I used:
forum.thinkpads.com • View topic - New SSD opt. for T4x : mSATA-to-IDE adapter ST663FD9 *PICS*

The newer JM-based adapter (the ST663FD9 being based on the JMH330) is discused as well as the
Marvell 88SA8052-NNC2 based Lycom/Addonics/Aleratec/DeLock/Kuroutoshikou adapter.
If in a hurry, you can read more about the latter from this post on:
forum.thinkpads.com • View topic - New SSD opt. for T4x : mSATA-to-IDE adapter ST663FD9 *PICS*

Johan from over there gave me a heads up on this and I think it is likely to work in the CF-51 also but I
have not tested it so proceed with caution.

 

I have been experimenting with two different setups in the M34. One was with 1.8 sata ssd (short story worked, but could stop working when bumped hard, data transfer seemed to be locked at 30mb/30mb on the adapter I used) The second one was ide to Msata I dropped the ball on that one with the first Msata being from a Dell mini and Dell used a non standard pin out on their Msata. I got a Intel X25 Msata for replacement but have not dropped it into the machine for testing yet. Hope to do so this time home.

 

I am very curious to hear what sort of throughput you get with that Intel SSD and in general
how it works out.

 

I hope I can put up some speed results soon. I am at the airport in Atlanta waiting on the flight home.

 

If you were to pick an "old-school" ToughBook that would be most similar to "old-school" ThinkPads, that would definitely be CF-51. I'd venture a guess that whatever solution works in an IBM-era machine will have no problems with CF-51.

I've picked up an Addonics mSATA-to-PATA adapter for my older ThinkPads (both my work-issued and personal ToughBooks are newer, SATA-powered units) and will likely test it out this coming weekend...then we can compare notes...

Stay tuned...:hi2:

 

I mentioned that I did not change the system, but actually I bought new ones just because of a cracked
display, and they are so inexpensive, but I had not replaced the T2500 with the T7200 that I first
used for testing the SSD. I just recently did swap the T7200 and the speed seems to be back to normal.
The difference is small but I do notice it. The T7200 benchmarks a bit faster and just feels slightly
faster in day to day use.

The latest system seems to run the fan more often than the others, even with the CPU core at about
40 C which is not very hot. I don't think I've seen the heat sink for the ATI graphics, but I wonder if it
needs new paste or something.

 

Given the age of these machines, I'd re-paste it...

 

Hi All,

I'm new to this forum and was trying to install a ATA/IDE SSD, OWCSSDMLP120 to replace the original drive in the CF-51 but unfortunately windows 7 cannot detect it. Windows XP manage to reformat and installed windows unto it but failed to boot. Hard drive shows in the bios. And the most weird thing is that after the installation of the SSD, the OWCSSDMLP120, the boot time from cd/dvd drive is way longer. It's like freezing. But if you're using the standard ATA/IDE drive, everything is normal. Please help if I missed an instructions on how to.