I'm thinking about changing the HDD in my HTPC to a SSD. However, it seems like the best deals (Kingston 40GB Intel-controller V-series) are SATA, and my HTPC has only PATA connectors.

I'm thinking about getting a SATA-PATA convertor card like this one.

However, I'm worried about passing TRIM commands through the convertor. As I understand it, the V-series currently don't support TRIM, and neither does WinXP which I'm using (and not going to switch from because of other constraints).

However, apparently there's an Intel utility that will work in WinXP and when run, will perform about the same steps as TRIM would normally. Now my questions are:

- Does the Intel 'trim-like' utility support the Kingston V-series?
- Will this utility work with a PATA-SATA bridge, in case the SSD itself is supported by it? Or will I need a PCI SATA controller?

The (40gb boot-drive) reviews I have seen say that the Intel utility does not work on Kingston drives, Kingston drives do not have Trim support yet and you can't flash an Intel firmware on them but kingston plans to add support for TRIM in the future.

ah as that seems to be the case, I will wait till the V-series support the Intel SSD Toolkit or equivalent before buying one.

Then I'll see whether it works through the PATA-SATA bridge. If not, I'll get a SATA PCI controller.

Trim support is nice of course but is it really that important for your kind of setup? Solid state is quiet and that's always nice, but for an older system I would perhaps go CF-to-IDE for a low cost solution.

Without trim or equivalent speed will decrease significantly over time as the drive fills up.

As for CF-to-IDE, all benchmarks Ive seen show abysmal performance. The Kingston intel-based V-series are actually quite affordable, and I think it's a viable upgrade for my aging system once trim support gets implemented.

Decrease significantly, sure. But it will still be faster than say a Velicoraptor. I doubt you would be able to tell the difference in a HTPC environment.

that discussion will probably be academic as the implementation of TRIM in the V-series seems to be highly likely.

Take a look at the RunCore PATA SSD drives, which use the Indilinx controller (so they don't need TRIM as much as older controllers).

Remember trim only affects the write speed of the SSD - it will still read at full speed and it spends far more time reading that writing.

My CF-to-IDE Transcend Drive is faster than my Seagate Momentus 5400rpm 60GB in every way.

Momentus : 37MB/sec read 15MS seek
Transcend CF Card to IDE : 41MB/sec read .1MS seek

all these native PATA or CF-PATA ideas are nice and all, but at this point I don't see any way how it's going to beat the price/performance of Kingston's intel-G2-based V-series 40GB drive + pata-sata convertor.

I have to agree. I just got a Kingston V-series 64GB when it was on sale at Frys. It replaced a VelociRaptor. Its definately faster than the Raptor, but doesn't blow it away. What I like about it, is that it runs cool, is silent and has no moving parts. I had to RMA a Seagate and the VelociRaptor recently. The Raptor seeks where annoying as well.

Well my CF card in my CF to IDE adapter has Lifetime Warranty threw Transcend. How long is that warranty on your Kingston SSD? LOL!

I think it's cool to build a PC where the PSU, "hard drive", memory, and video card all have lifetime warrantys. No more repair costs! (cross your fingers that your motherboard doesn't die)

If you care about performance at all you should look at the U3S6 card and use modern sata drives.

http://www.provantage.com/asus-u3s6~7ASU917P.htm

For the small cost of the card you not only upgrade your drive controller but you also get USB3 ports as well.

I bought the Intel X25-V 40GB drive (nearly identical price to the Kingston), and hooked it up through a unbranded chinese PATA-SATA convertor.

It works like a charm on the PATA port of my intel 815 chipset, however the Intel SSD toolkit says that it cannot perform any manual trim as it does not support 'RAID configuration'. I suppose that is the default error when it does not find the drive hooked up through a supported IDE driver.

I wonder if third party SATA controllers will work with the toolkit; however I'm not convinced that I'll need the manual trim anytime soon, as I won't be writing much data onto the drive (probably not more than 12 GB).

update: manual trim works on the PATA-SATA bridge on my Thinkpad T43. I'm not sure if this is due to a newer version of the Intel Toolkit, or because of differences between the two bridge chips used.

Hi FrankL,

I am a proud owner of a Thinkpad T43. SSD upgrade has also been on my mind for a while but that Marvell SATA-IDE bridge bugged me to no end. (Although some guys went to the lengths of removing it)

Watching the new drive adapters popping up on ebay everyday finally made me want to go the alternate route; 1.8" uSATA SSD with the new IDE-uSATA adapter.

Problem is, I have read on thinkpad forums that this adapter has a problem with the Marvell chip on the T43, and windows installations will result in errors! When I saw that you ran a SATA SSD on your T43 I almost jumped. The adapter is known to work with ANY Thinkpads with IDE, but shown to fail on T43's!

Could you clarify the setup, and specifications of your T43 laptop with the intel SSD? If there is a way to use the adapter, I would much rather buy that than to risk breaking my motherboard removing the Marvell chip.

I had the Intel SATA SSD hooked up through a IDE-SATA bridge in a Ultrabay adapter branded 'LQE' from China (bought through Ebay) like this one

The Marvell SATA-IDE bridge chip is bothering me too but I'm too much of a coward to desolder it right now as the T43 works nicely. I might give it a go when I have the money and need to buy a new laptop anyway.

I guess desoldering the Marvell chip gets rid of ~2 watts as it alleviates the need for the Ultrabay bridge chip + gets rid of the usage by the Marvell bridge (which is ~1 watt).