While I do have SSHD drives in two of my newer desktops, in my retro machines I use standard SATA drives. The fastest ones are 2 TB Samsung and Seagate drive. I use SeaTools to limit the capacity and turn them into 32 GB drives, although any other capacity can be configured. Connectivity is provided through SATA to IDE adapter and this solution works very well.

Been using it for a while across many machines and it's my favourite storage solution. Seeing that these SSHD drives come with 8 GB of SSD, one could limit the capacity to 8 GB and see if you get proper SSD speed. Personally I find the standard drives so fast and the old machines are really the limiting factor here. Put another way I couldn't notice an improvement when using a SSD over a standard modern SATA drive.

yup already running modern sata drives - I use a 40gb ide for boot + 2x 1.5 wd greens for storage (sil3112 controller). I am finding all these drives/hardware cards are taxing my power supply though.

If the caching works as claimed there surely would be a performance boost when booting at least? I would have thought that a sshd would be a way of overcoming the inherent disadvantages of the old machines.

RE: limiting capacity - not sure they work like that - think there is an intelligent controller in there performing the caching on the seagate drives. If it was just a 8gb ssd stickytaped to a normal drive it wouldn't be anywhere near as attractive.

There might be documentation on Seagate's site about the SSHD algorithm. I remember reading something about caching data of the first 40 seconds after power up to cache the boot files and speed up booting.

Seagate drives also have technology to address not aligning the driver under old operating systems. Quite retro friendly when you look at all the features.

Really no point, a Single platter 7200 rpm Sata III HD will nearly max the PCI bus, and your still basically getting a Hard drive.
Switching full over to SSD's once 1tb drives are @ the price range 128gb's are now, is my eventual plan for all my retro machines, and it has no real reason to do with speed, more or less reliability. With the full 1tb per drive Accessible over PCI Sil 3112\3114\3512 controllers under 9x.

You are still getting a performance increase due to no seek times on the cached content, even if the bus is saturated. Plus 7200 is an earsore.

I thought SSD's will kill themselves without TRIM on older OSes - unless this has been solved?

Anyway, I think some benchmarks might answer these questions (hint hint!). Esp interested to see how it goes loading a game like carmageddon on an older spec pc (e.g boot dos, run carmageddon, quit then load again).

No even without trim they still do their own garbage collection and wear leveling routines.
9x and dos and even XP don't write to them heavy enough @ anyrate.
Also if you can hear a modern SP-7200 RPM hard drive over a 120mm fan in your system.
Your ears are super-man level 🤣 .
Modern drives barely make audible clicky sounds 🙁

Aha ok well if that is the case that does change everything - I think this is a recent development though. Might have to note which SSD drives support such automatic garbage collection.

my modern 7200 rpm 4tb HGST drives are the noisiest components in my main system by far. Even WD greens annoy me a bit. I think complete silence in a retro pc is something worth having (something we could never have back in the day!).

There are tools for TRIMming SSD under XP, don't know if those will work on older OSes - probably not.
For Intel SSDs there is "Intel SSD Toolbox".
The OCZ Vertex is supposed to TRIM itself (firmware feature so maybe you have to update the firmware).

4-tb drives are multi-platter drives.
They are gonna whir louder as a consequence as there is more for the motor to drive along with likely using a more powerful one.
Modern Single platter Sata II and III hard drives are nearly silent in comparison.
You find them in the lower density drives.

Use this in my Pentium M Laptop:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HZT4CFS/r … 0?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Supposedly on modern SSD's you don't really need to worry about Trim OS support anymore.

If the SSD's controller implements proper garbage collection and wear leveling, TRIM is not required. Unless you fill it up to full capacity, in which case the controller will never be able to find "free" blocks again and write speed will suffer ever after.

philscomputerlab wrote:

While I do have SSHD drives in two of my newer desktops, in my retro machines I use standard SATA drives. The fastest ones are 2 TB Samsung and Seagate drive. I use SeaTools to limit the capacity and turn them into 32 GB drives, although any other capacity can be configured. Connectivity is provided through SATA to IDE adapter and this solution works very well.

This seems so wasteful 🙁
A 32GB flash drive is much less expensive and provides far better access times compared to a spinning disk. And I don't really see why you would limit a drive to 32GB the first place?

You'd have to go back 6 years or so to find a SSD without some kind of garbage collection. It really is a null issue. SSDs are also fairly cheap now anyway.

jwt27 wrote:

A 32GB flash drive is much less expensive and provides far better access times compared to a spinning disk. And I don't really see why you would limit a drive to 32GB the first place?

Cost per GB of flash is actually very expensive. Access time is great, but writing performance lacking. What is the price of a 128 GB CF card? And how much is a modern 500 GB SATA drive? CF is great for DOS. but once you use Windows 98 SE or Windows XP there are better storage solutions.

Why limit capacity? Compatibility with old computers of course!

Check this out: Hard drive options for Retro PCs

I dunno if it is just me, but I found CF cards bloody awful with games like doom, even in DOS - slowdowns galore (little disk icon at top of screen). Same deal with microdrives.

OK sounds like I'll hold off for SSD's for my boot drives then. Prefer having 2 or 3 separate small drives for the different OS's - would rather not have something like a scandisk accidentally nuke 3 operating systems.

kreats wrote:

I dunno if it is just me, but I found CF cards bloody awful with games like doom, even in DOS - slowdowns galore (little disk icon at top of screen). Same deal with microdrives.

That's because CF cards usually have very poor performance with small files, especially if writing. Early SSDs had the same problem. Microdrives were just a way to make affordable higher capacity CF cards back when flash memory was still expensive and they are pretty slow HDDs.

I've been reading the occasional threads like this one on VOGONS for awhile now. The various ideas and opinions regarding storage solutions always intrigue me.

Here's my opinion: on a cost/complexity/performance basis, I think most people are over-thinking this issue. IDE/PATA/ATA133 80gb drives with 8mb cache are very cheap and readily available. Even the 20/40/60gb drives with 2mb cache still perform very well. Is there really much more performance to be gained for an old Win9x system that would justify the extra cost and complexity involved? Just use an old IDE drive and keep things simple and stable. Personally, I find the clicking, grinding, and whirring of the old drives to be a charming part of the whole retro/vintage experience.

For WinXP systems, the issue becomes more complex. The Advanced Format 4k-sector SATA drives present a minor problem. The 2tb limit is another issue. SSDs are also an interesting option that I haven't experimented with yet (because I'm cheap). To idspispopd and others running SSDs under XP: what are you doing to get around the lack of TRIM support?

idspispopd wrote:

There are tools for TRIMming SSD under XP, don't know if those will work on older OSes - probably not.
For Intel SSDs there is "Intel SSD Toolbox".
The OCZ Vertex is supposed to TRIM itself (firmware feature so maybe you have to update the firmware).

Also Samsung SSD could be trimmed manually in windows xp with Samsung Magician.

I'd flip that on it's head and say - why settle for anything but the best (within the constraints of the old system)? I find the clicking and grinding a tortuous reminder of the past when I was cursing my system to shut up and load things.

With use, one day you will wake up and find the old pata drive dead unexpectedly (and if it is second hand, who knows what kind of life it has had)- you can prevent this by upgrading every now and again.

Cost really isn't that much compared to reinstalling everything when it fails (unless you are imaging regularly).

I think power supplies fall into this category also - if you've ever had a dodgy power supply take out half your hardware you may agree with me.

I tend to use HDDs in slower PATA systems. It's simpler to just use a PATA drive than mess with a SATA-PATA adapter and the extra wires. And on something like a K6 or P3, a relatively modern HDD is going to be essentially as fast as a SSD anyway because the CPU is so slow. Modern-ish HDDs that use FDBs are so quiet that they don't bother me.

When I get to ~1 GHz CPUs though I wire up the SSD because it's just so stupid fast and silent.