Have spend weeks reading all about SSD and it appears that MLC type drives are most proned to the evil "Studdering" effect. Makers like Transcend even don't recommend their MLC based HD for "OS" base installation. Nevertheless, of all the online reviews i've been reading about SSD and test reports of home users, all seem to base their reviews and complaints on setups with relatively NEW computers and laptops. Virtually none with the use of SSD as an upgrade path for 10+ year old laptops.

Some MLC based hard drives have minimized the effects of studdering by the use of a cache on the HD's controller. The led me to believe that in cases where the write speed is too demanding (ie. 100MB/sec), the SSD hard drive bottlenecks up and by having a cache, it reduces the effects of the write "studdering". So the question I have is:

Will studdering ever be an issue for an old computer who's write transfer rate is tremendously slow (by today's standard). Like ATA 3/4/or5. which I believe has a maximum speed of 66MB/sec (burst or continuous?).

For interest, the laptop I hope to upgrade is the Compaq Presario 1700. PIII-600Mhz and came with a 6GB hard drive. From looking at the brochure specs, it shows that UDMA was a feature on all the hard drives though i'm not quite sure how fast UDMA on ATA-5 speed was. If the IDE contoller claimed to do 66MB/sec, I know for a fact it ain't continuous rate (most likely burst rate). Yes I know most would say to dump the laptop and buy new but for it's particular application, i'm not convinced buying a new pre-loaded Vista notebook would increase productivity.

BQ

You have a reasonable pov, you may be quite right. But you may have a hard time finding an appropriate PATA interface SSD for your laptop. All the new 2.5" SSDs appear to offer only SATA.

Yes it will stutter. Write speed bottleneck has nothing to do with it. We're talking about under 1 MB/s write speeds causing this issue.

As Mike said you probably won't find one that will work with that old laptop. I'd dump the Compaq and pick up a cheap netbook. You'll get much better performance, battery life, and weight. The screen resolution would stay the same.

Anandtech just did a very extensive article that explained why most MLC SSD stutter. There is a fairly good discussion of that article on these forums, as well. Anyway, it turns out that stuttering is caused not by sequential writing, as you thought might be the case, but random writing. Basically, the inherent random write performance of MLC is terrible -- like floppy drive slow. Cache alone cannot solve this problem, you need a specially designed controller -- something the stutter-free MLC drives have.

Now your ancient laptop may actually be free of stuttering for a completely different reason than you had thought -- the OS. The newer OS like XP and especially Vista do a lot of fiddling with the drive in the background. It is this background fiddling coinciding with a user action that also requires a write to disk that usually triggers the stuttering. If your old laptop is still running Windows 98, you may never see any stutters. Of course, as people have already said, good luck finding a drive that is compatible with the machine. AFAIK all the PATA SSD drives were OEM for things like the Mac Air and replacement parts were incredibly expensive for end users. Maybe you could find a used one on eBay, though?

Thanks for your thoughts. I wasn't sure if anyone would reply considering how most people in my situation would just pick up a new netbook of some sort.

I've jumped the gun by buying 2 Transcend MLC SSD units off eBay. A 64GB and a 32GB version in IDE (PATA) 2.5" form. I purchased these about a month ago in fear that IDE SSD units will no longer be available in the future (looks like pata extinction by year end) You guys are right, I don't see any major online PC supplier that stocks PATA versions and if they do, the premium would much be like buying a high spec AGP card when a PCI-E of half the price would do more.



I suppose Intel's version of their MLC based SSD wouldn't help with their featured cache? However, I don't believe they use the same JMicron controller that many of the other brands do including the Transcend ones.

I'm currently overseas and it won't be able to tinker with the 2 SSD drives until a months time. Perhaps then, i'll need to post my results.

The Compaq laptop originally came with Windows 98. But for most of it's life, it's been running Win 2K pro. The 2nd laptop is an even older laptop Dell Latitude CP (PII-233Mhz, 3GB HD 2.5" IDE) that originally came with Win95 but for most of it's life, have been Win2k as the OS.

The particular work these laptops do has nothing to do with modern day gaming. The day to day road use of these laptops is based purely on MS Excel and the odd letter mail and some brief internet. Since both laptops are still on their original HD, a drive crash would be more fatal than anything else. So going to a solid state drive seemed like a good choice over the chance that a new HD or even the old hard drive could fail from a bad drop. BTW, i've also noticed that modern hard drives do not have the same reliability track record as once in the past say several years ago. Like cars, perhaps they don't make hard drives like they use to.

Have you guys heard of any stuttering issues with SLC based SSDs? I know all the modern tests show them ultra high speed like 100MB/s and up, but I suppose this is the case when going SATA.

I forgot to mention that on the Compaq, the Win2k OS apparently has it's own version of studdering. For power savings, while working in Excel for some minutes the hard drive will stop (as set in the power saving control panel). But every so often, maybe 2 minutes after the HD stops, the OS or Excel will want to write on the hard drive. So during the process of waking up the hard drive, the computer momentarily freezes. This can be a bit annoying if at the time, i'm trying to type #s into Excel the computer is unresponsive for a few seconds.

I don't know how much fiddling Windows 2K actually does if it's based on the early NT4 OS?

BQ

An aside -- Stutter is the word you're really wanting to use, right? I know we mostly pronounce it studder, but it's spelled stutter. Studder doesn't appear in any dictionary I know -- not yet.

Can you say, hey, he's studder than me! or.... maybe that dude over there is the studdest!

Yeh I just only noticed my mispelling after the original post.

BTW, currently doing the long read in the AnandTech link from another thread and... the writing on the wall is getting clear, "I should of bought SLC".

I installed a Transcend 32GB SSD MLC PATA disk into my 5 year old laptop just a month ago. I've been happy with it and have not seen any stuttering problems.

However, I have to say I use the laptop only for email and web browsing. The original 40GB disk of it crashed around 6 months ago, and at that time I decided to experiment with a 8GB Compact Flash card using an IDE adapter as a replacement disk. That worked, sort of, but since the card had only 30MB/s read/write it did have pretty bad stuttering problems. Also, Windows recognized that as a removable disk (looked funny having C: as a removable disk) and Windows Update wouldn't work because of that.

So, a month ago I got fed up with that and switched to a real SSD disk, and everything is about 3 times faster now, including Windows boot time (which has never been this fast!).

So, all in all, I'm happy with my decission to go for SSD.

Pate

According to Anand, both Intel X25-M and OCZ Vertex are perfectly fine MLC drives which do not suffer from any stuttering. Intel uses their own controller, and the Vertex uses an Indilinx controller.

What I understood is that you've already tried cheap SSDs and experienced stuttering. OCZ's forums list many things you can do to diminish the problem with their drives; perhaps some of them will be applicable to your Transcend drives and dated system & OS.

If you buy a new laptop, you certainly won't have to use Vista with it. XP should still be available, and Linux is free (gratis) and suitable for your needs (especially if you can substitute OpenOffice Calc for Excel).

The stuttering you will get from your new MLC SSD will be no worse than what you are experiencing from the power-save features of the existing drive. That's good news, sort of?

Windows 2K, if it has been fully patched, is pretty damn close to Windows XP. The OS will do enough background stuff to trigger some stuttering. May not be noticeable on such an old computer though. We're talking about a very slow (by today's standards) single-core CPU. There is a relatively big delay pretty much every time you try and do something that may well cover up any lag due solely to SSD issues. Remember, you don't hear people complaining about stuttering on netbooks, even though they use really low-end SSD. The reason why is that the CPU is so relatively slow that SSD-related bottlenecks are not as apparent.

Yes, it will. Look at the "4KB Random Write Speed", to see why. Most SSD MLC drives still use the JMicron controllers. Even the OCZ Summit, which tries to go around the problem with tricks, doesn't really cut it when compared to a standard 5400rpm had disk (the Momentus).

It took me a long time to finished reading (fully) that AnandTech article. Felt like 20 pages. After those test results, I can see why the Intel SSD units were well ahead of the others. Even under Random Write tests, they were getting nearly 20 times faster than the conventional HDs. (Intel X25-M 23.1MB/s vs WD Caviar SE16 1.26MB/s.

What I find interesting is he even compared the test using the Samsung SLC which had a random write of 0.53MB/s. So the expensive SLC hard drives still can't beat the conventional HD in terms of random writing. But, look at the pricing for SLC drives of the same GB size. The Intel units seem competitively priced to the SLC variants yet, the performance of the SLC ones aren't even close to the speed of the Intels (in both sequential & random writing).

However in my current situation, all these tests really don't apply to me as they relate to performanced in somewhat NEW computers with high speed SATA. For me to take advantage of the Intel drives, I need a laptop that has SATA2.

As in the previous post, the slow Transcend units I have may be no different experience than what my current ancient laptops do (with the stutter of the on/off HD power saving feature).

The newer SSD drives with tricks, like the Vortex, might be ok for you, but look at the "speeds" of the JMicron-based SSDs. That's not a bit worse, that's an order of magnitude worse. I believe this is too close for comfort, even considering the overall sloweness of the laptop.

It would be best if you could test an SSD before buying, since even the cheap ones will set you back quite a bit. On the other hand, why not get a standard modern notebook hard disk? Those are dirt cheap compared to SSDs, and pose no risk of weird behaviour.

The 64GB MLC Transcend set me back less than $150 USD shipped to my doorstep. NCIX.com (Vancouver) sells the OCZ Vertex 60GB and it would cost me well over $320 USD after taxes and shipping. If i'm gonna spend the $320 on an OCZ, why not spend the extra $100 and get the Intel 32GB X25-M which is "an order of magnitude BETTER" than any of the SSDs made today? But then again, those are ALL SATA which is useless to me.



I can't stress how critical the data is on our laptop when on the road trip. Yes I do backups but even then, a HD crash will still be fatal in terms of time lost - time to re-install the OS + MS Office software, etc. Not to mention the hassles of having to bring all the software setup discs (I like to travel light). My intention is to go try out the SSD and bring just the old HD for backup - as we know that with computers, nothing is 100% reliable.

I havn't been too impressed with the reliability track record of hard drives made in the past few years. Actually I think over a period of many years the level of RMA returns for hard drives is at an all time high compared to the HDs made 10+ years ago. So my thoughts with going SSD would be more based on reliability. Of course the other argument could be that the LCD screen on my old laptops could die or perhaps, even the CPU. But then again, even new computers prove not to be any more reliable. In the past 3 years, we've had 3 LCD screens die on us (just past their 3 year warranty period). When laptop LCD screens made 10+ years ago are still operating fine today...

The funny thing was I clearly remember the time back in 2000 buying the Compaq laptop. The salesman insisted I buy their extended warranty plan because he said LCD screens are known to burn out fast. I asked him how long should I expect the LCD screen to last, he said maybe 1 or 2 years (the warranty plan he wanted to sell me was for 3 years). Now over 9 years has ticked by and it still works - Oh and the particular Compaq I bought was a show-room demo model so it wasn't like it wasn't newly purchased.

The Dell Latitude CP is even some years older than the Compaq and it's LCD is still going today. Why is it that computer vendors can't make things as reliable as they use to be???

He said this because his compensation or ability to keep his job (depends on the store) was based on how many extended warranties he could sell. Stores make more money off of them than the equipment they are for, generally.

Well if you have the extra $100 to spend why not. But Like I've never been a fan of the fastest HDDs like Raptors, I'd personally go for the somewhat slower Vertex since it works as well as the Intel drive and save the $100. Though if the prices are $320 and $420 (like you said) Intel even has the better GB/$ ratio.

But like you said, they are SATA so this doesn't matter to you

Well... in this case I have to ask, why not travelling with an external RAID1 where data is stored and have an additional mirrored HDD set up for exchange in case system drive failes. Actually, as the probability of your laptop failing are about the same as an system harddrive fail, you'd probably be better of having two setups with everything installed and the external RAID1 data host. In all cases you may have a better price-ratio for security (in case of harddrive failure or laptop failure... it could burn, somebody could step on it, whatever).

Btw. Aren't the laptop IDE-ports 40pin whereas desktop IDE-HDD have 44 pins? There are converters, but will the drive still fit in there? Otherwise it might be wise to look at 1.8" drives and connect via adaptors. But don't ask me about speed tradeoffs there.

For the sake of backups, having 2 laptop setups seems like being prerpared for the end of the world. Being mobile, space is also a concern.

I looked at what hard drives the Compaq 1700 laptops use and they appear to be the same standard 2.5" IDE 44pin connector on the desktops. I believe the earlier 3.5" hard drives are plain 40pin for the desktops. So as far as the Transcend SSDs go, they should fit in the laptop no problem. Sucks to keep waiting.

Mohan had it backwards, laptop IDE uses 44 pins (because it includes the power pins) and desktop IDE uses 40 pins (because power is on a separate connector).

I just got a Transcend 128GB 2.5" IDE SSD for my older laptop, it's working fine. According to the data sheet, it's actually a SATA SSD with an IDE bridge chip.

And yes, it occasionally stutters, but I was already expecting that.

in real life applications - not an issue.

i've installed a Transcend EIDE SSD in my old Dell and if there's a studdering, it's no more noticeable than with the hard drive that was in before.

at any rate, you will not expect a stellar performance out of an old laptop. SSD, however, does help with things like Windows boot and programs launching so an old machine does feel snappier.

For anyone with one of the JMicron based SSDs, you can often significantly reduce the effects of stutter so that it's often not noticable by making sure the partition is aligned on the proper boundary.

For example, Vista does this by default by aligning the partitions on 1MB offsets, but older versions of Windows didn't. Not having the proper partition alignment can kill SSD write performance as it can cause a small write to a single file to end up causing a erase/write of two data pages instead of one.

Yes i've read up about partition alignment for use in XP however, none in the case of using Windows 2000. I know Win2K is old but hey, so are my IDE laptops.

http://www.liliputing.com/2008/12/whats ... -2000.html

http://www.computerworld.com/action/art ... Id=9123140

Perhaps this partition alignment has something to do with the NTFS file system present in XP, Vista, & W7 ?

But Win2k also supports NTFS so i'm not sure if those reports were based on an SSD formatted FAT32 or NTFS?

What about the issue of going FAT32 as a file system. I've read that it's faster than NTFS as it will eliminate tasks like 'journaling' in the file system.

BQ

It doesn't matter what OS you are using, you want to make sure that the filesystem data blocks are aligned to the data blocks on the SSD.

I don't recall how FAT32 aligns data on the disk, so I don't know how performance will be affected by partition alignment.

But for NTFS, partition alignment on SSDs makes a significant difference.

Read what you're citing.

Nothing related to the filesystem. Yes, you should align here too.
And IIRC NTFS is default for W2K.

BTW they also give a truly interesting statement (attributed to Patriot, just like the previous one):

This means that their SSDs (they meant the Lite series probably) have very sucky controller - with only dynamic wear leveling or no wear leveling at all. If it's almost full with data that you don't move, it will die soon.
And I guess that by "habit" they mean FAT32.

Ok i've manage to get some time and started playing with the Transcend SSD IDE units on old laptops. My results were very satisfying but the adventure in getting there was far from a cake walk. I would have to say that for most who are intersted in venturing the same path as I did, I want to say that I had a lot of troubles getting diskpart & diskpar to work.

It took me the best part of a day just to get the 64 GB SSD drive align partitioned. For awhile it was one hurdle after another and mainly because of the age of the laptop, and being IDE. At 1st I had already downloaded the Vista Recovery CD and was ready to do the align procedure. Burning the ISO file to CD-R was also mistake. I thought it was a bad burn and decided to burn another copy - still same results (the laptop would not execute the disc). So thinking that Vista Recovery CD was not compatible, I looked for other way. Then I had a blank DVD+RW disc so tried that. Yep the laptop could boot from it however, at the very end of the loading, I get the BSOD. Did several attempts and with swapping different RAM thinking that was the problem - still no go. So had to look for another way.

Then I went down the path of using some sort of 'boot floppy'. Looked online on various boot floppy such as BartPE - all were too complicated to setup. So I made a boot floppy from my XP box and copied the 2 'diskpar / diskpart' files on it. Did boot floppy on the laptop and would you know, those 2 files won't execute. Then I thought maybe it had something to do with the FAT DOS-boot floppy so I brought out the old Windows 2000 boot install floppies. Exited to console and diskpart command came up with some basic GUI (the same you would get when doing a CD install of the OS on an empty HD). There wasn't any of the commands as shown in the OCZ align guide.

BTW, many of the online guides show a way to align the disk by use of an already existing PC. However the 2.5" SSD drives are 44 pin laptop and require an adapter to connect to a desktop 40pin IDE (which I didn't have). The key problem is not having full partition control of the new hard drive while something boots off it. This meant that even if diskpar or diskpart would run, there was no way I could make the partition unactive or active in stand alone.

I got desperate and started to look at different recovery CDs. Well it turned out that I had to use a Windows 2003 Server install disc to boot, partition, and format knowing the HD wouldn't be aligned. Full install of the OS. Boot and go to command prompt and try out the diskpart command. Well it executed but the key parameter to set the alignment came back saying like, "you can't change the partition sector blah blah on the drive you booted from..."

Well since diskpart didn't work (the command imbedded into the Win2003 Server OS), I looked at diskpar. Copied that file to a floppy and see by chance if that worked (CD A:\ from command prompt window). To my surprise diskpar worked but it also nuked the current partition. The OS locked up and had to do a hard reboot. Screen came back with some error in OS boot hard disk etc... I thought I could just use the Win2K OS disc to boot cd rom install and format it. Well it came back with some stupid error about the hard drive needs to be "Locked" and had to make it unactive. Well I couldn't go any further.

So another util program called Paragon HD Manager came to the rescue. It's a boot cd and I used it to see what was going on with the partition. I told it to 'set the partition ACTIVE' without changing any of the sectors (not that it would let me do it).

Then back to boot the Win2K install disc. It FORMATTED! and continued the setup. Reboot and back to command prompt to double checked the HD offset alignment was correct. SUCCESS!

PERFORMANCE?

Well hands down it's definitely a lot faster than the original 6GB IBM HD. After post bios boot, it's down to less than 40 seconds to fully load into desktop. Shutdown is an impressive 3 - 4 seconds. It doesn't appear that the applications i've installed greatly increased the boot speed (the programs load in the systray almost immediately). I guess that's the real power of going SSD.

Now going back to the original post I made here, I have not encountered any stuttering from normal multitasking. Using IE6 + copying files from a USB flash card, etc. However, I did encouter the odd complete lock up when copying files off the network HD to the laptop. Though I suspect it could be network related but the problems didn't arise when copying the same files off USB over ethernet.

Keep in mind i've done all the SSD tweaks I know such as disabling indexing, 8.3 DOS naming, registry edits, etc. I also discovered that in Windows 2000 you can't set pagefile = 0. But i've done the registry tweak that deletes the page file on shutdown so on boot, it's a fresh pagefile (for better wear leveling).

I hope all this is helpful to others looking to use SSD IDE in older laptops.

BQ

Has anyone noticed any noises coming from their SSD? When the SSD is writing or reading (ie when booting), putting my ear close to the hard drive I can hear some wee electronic noise. Hard to describe that sound but it's the same very faint sound of a normal hard drive. Searched online came up with nothing except 1 person suggested it could be the capacitors in the drive emitting that noise?

It may only be specific to the Transcend like of MSC SSDs?

Again, the sound is very faint and you would have to put your ear up near it and only when there's activity going on.

Another issue i've found is that the hard drive seems to run hotter than I would expect from an SSD. I mean, as warm as a normal spindle drive which means i'm not getting much of any power savings, if any.

BQ

Surface temperature is not a good indicator of power dissipated as heat. It is very dependent on surface area of conductive materials and the conductivity of the materials you are touching. That said, 2.5" drives only use about 2-3W on average, so there isn't that much to save. However, on something constrained by battery power, just saving a single Watt can have a pretty significant effect on battery life.

Well it's been over a year's use with the Transcend 64GB MLC SSD on the Compaq laptop. Studder is indeed an issue. Quite noticeably boot times are slower, a LOT slower when new. The studder problem arises just after Win2k boots and as soon as you see the desktop display, you have to wait an annoying 15-20 seconds before you can click on anything. No hour glass appears on the mouse cursor to show the laptop is busy. So just after a boot, it's annoying to wait for the boot studder to finish.

After the boot, loading apps and web browsing is no problems. If it wasn't for the shockproof in SSDs, I would of switched back to conventional hard drives.

Perhaps the SLC version would be immuned to such studder or is it because i'm on IDE / Pata?

Well it's been over a year's use with the Transcend 64GB MLC SSD on the Compaq laptop. Studder is indeed an issue. Quite noticeably boot times are slower, a LOT slower when new. The studder problem arises just after Win2k boots and as soon as you see the desktop display, you have to wait an annoying 15-20 seconds before you can click on anything. No hour glass appears on the mouse cursor to show the laptop is busy. So just after a boot, it's annoying to wait for the boot studder to finish.

After the boot, loading apps and web browsing is no problems. If it wasn't for the shockproof in SSDs, I would of switched back to conventional hard drives.

Perhaps the SLC version would be immuned to such studder or is it because i'm on IDE / Pata?