question Transcend 16gb & 8gb pata ssd works great for my Thinkpad!

[back in black]

A few months ago I found myself in the market for a SSD that would fit the bill for my IBM/Lenovo my two T42P Thinkpads. Anyone with an older laptop probably knows that there are next to no choices in this catagory. I did a bit of research and landed on the Transcend PATA SSD, first in the 8gb flavor, and then the 16gb. Size wasn't a concern to me as I was going to use it for a boot drive. I purchased a sata hard drive caddy off ebay that slid into the cd-rom bay. I have read that a lot of people have had less than stellar performance with SSD's with the old JMicron controller's. The SSD that I received for both sizes have the revised controller.

So here I am several months into ownership of these drives, and I could not be happier. Boot time to my xp home screen is less than 12 seconds, and shut down time is less than 10 seconds. Microsoft Word opens as if it were minimized. Just about everything else that I would normally do on the computer shows absolutely no lag at all, Youtube, Ebay, Email, etc. In fact the laptop now performs just as well as my friends Acer laptop running an i3 cpu with 7200 rpm hard drive.

Because there is no much confusion and speculation out there, I would like to just point out my experience with these SSD's. There just seems to be a discrepancies throughout this industry with regards to the performance of SSD's from manufacturer to manufacturer. I would like to let everyone out there know that my experience has been a positive one. Now I am just wondering if anyone else out there who can say the same...

Your thoughts and comments below.:tgif:

 

[timwhit]

Nice to know. What model did you get and where did you purchase them?

 

[back in black]

Well the 8gb I might have overpaid for, but it was just the curiosity that drove that purchase. Based on the outcome I think it's still good considering for the performance boost it gave. I got that one at Newegg for $90 at the time. The 16gb I purchased on FleaBay for about the same price. The performance on the 16gb is slightly better based on the results that HDtune gave me.

 

[back in black]

The models that I bought are as follows:

Transcend TS16GSSD25-S 2.5" 16GB PATA SLC Internal Solid State Drive
Transcend TS8GSSD25-S 2.5" 8GB PATA SLC Internal Solid State Drive

 

[BingBangBop]

I'll ask what is the point of these drives? While I recognize that theoretically you can boot windows using 16GB, but you still need space for applications and data. So I feel that 40GB is the minimum useful size.

You said that size didn't matter because all you were going to do is boot from them. Well that doesn't work at all with the 8GB drive and is very borderline for the 16GB drive.

 

[CougTek]

You can easily fit Windows XP inside 8GB. Not Vista or 7, but since we're talking about a T42, then it came with an XP sticker. You'd have to turn off the system restore and clean your temporary files often, like after every WindowsUpdate run, but you can certainly operate XP on an 8GB drive. My WinXP installation on used systems normally takes between 6GB and 7.5GB. I install a bunch of free utilities and protection softwares and include them in that amount.

 

[Mercutio]

16GB is plenty for an install of XP, Office, a decent web browser and a meaningful amount of end-user data. My sysprep install for XP SP3 + Office 2003 and a ton of extra drivers clocks in at just a hair over 1.5GB, less the swap and hibernation files.

 

[timwhit]

My installs of OpenSuse use around 5-7GB. I would feel comfortable with a 16GB boot drive.

I'm guessing other Linux distros are similar.

 

[CougTek]

BTW, I realized that I'm typing from a P4 2.8GHz with a c: partition of less than 10GB. It's the machine I've been using at home for the past month or so.

 

[back in black]

Well in the t-series laptops from IBM, there are after-market sata hard drive caddies available that conveniently fit in the cd-rom bay. I really never use a cd/dvd rom anyway. If by chance I need one, I have an external usb.

So, in my main setup I have the 16 gb pata ssd drive as my boot drive, with plenty of room to spare...while my extra caddy houses a Seagate 320gb, 7200 rpm HDD. This is the drive that I keep all my other data and larger programs on.

I have to admit it might be overkill for an old machine, but I like these machines. They are plenty fast for what I need it to do, parts are dirt cheap, and they are very reliable and comfortable to use.

 

[back in black]

BTW, I realized that I'm typing from a P4 2.8GHz with a c: partition of less than 10GB. It's the machine I've been using at home for the past month or so.

This sorta validates that an "everyday" machine (i.e. email, internet, word, etc.) ... really doesn't need a ton of hard drive space to be very useful!

 

[Mercutio]

This sorta validates that an "everyday" machine (i.e. email, internet, word, etc.) ... really doesn't need a ton of hard drive space to be very useful!

I concur, but it's much easier when you have some kind of anchor to the many terabytes of data you would undoubtedly like to access.

 

[Stereodude]

I tried one of these before and it sucked. I wasn't aware that there were any fixed PATA Jmicron controllers.

 

[Will Rickards]

Wait the T42 has a PATA main drive bay but a SATA CDROM drive bay?
Shouldn't it be the other way around. I know that is the problem with my old dell laptop. Even if I got a media bay adaptor, it'd have to be a PATA drive.

 

[Howell]

I would like to think that SSDs could make machines which are limited to 2G max memory livable into the future and viable as inexpensive test boxes. However using an entire 8G drive as swap space (or a large portion of a slightly larger drive) make TRIM an obvious necessity. Do all the most popular OSs support TRIM?

 

[back in black]

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[back in black]

I tried one of these before and it sucked. I wasn't aware that there were any fixed PATA Jmicron controllers.

This is the point of my post really. I had a the previous version and it was really bad. The newer version makes my laptop fly. I really haven't looked back since this upgrade.

 

[back in black]

Wait the T42 has a PATA main drive bay but a SATA CDROM drive bay?
Shouldn't it be the other way around. I know that is the problem with my old dell laptop. Even if I got a media bay adaptor, it'd have to be a PATA drive.

Look into it. I know for the thinkpad's at least, there is a sata option.

 

[Mercutio]

Any Thinkpad that's compatible with the Ultrabay, even going back as far as the T20, can have a SATA drive bay. Yes really. As I recall, there are still disk controller limitations, but the drives are at least detected in the BIOS. Lenovo also doesn't like to discuss the fact that the Ultrabay battery still works in modern Thinkpads, but the internal interface hasn't changed for a very long time.

 

[back in black]

That's why I like these thinkpads so much. I also have a t60p and the dvd drive bays are interchangable with my t42p.

 

[Santilli]

It's a lot of money for a tiny drive. I did a similar thing, buying two Kingspec 32 gig PATA
drives. One works fine, runs aroun 70 MB/sec reads. The other really sucks, and, I'm thinking of taking it apart to find out if it's one of those Chinese drives with a real 4 gigs of memory, and two giant nuts inside.

I found, at least with Panasonic CF-51's, that the 7200RPM Seagate PATA drives feel nearly the same, speedwise, since the horrible writes on the Kingspec drives drag it down.

200 bucks for 16 gigs? Who are they kidding? Monopoly pricing. Better to save a bit and buy a new laptop. That's my plan.