buckeye wrote:

Been wanting to do this but it's uncharted territory for me. Is there a particular SSD I need or an expansion card?

My mobo: Foxconn Q45M

Keep hearing about TRIM, where does this come into play? Thanks ahead for any tips!

In short, when you delete something on SSD it doesn't actually free up the space for new files unless TRIM tells the SSD to do so. As XP doesn't support TRIM, the SSD would be only using its own garbage collection which are pretty good these days I believe. So if you pop XP on SSD it might start to run slow at some point depending how large the SSD is and how much you use it, but at any rate I think it would in all likelyhood take years before it starts acting up. Some manufacturers like Samsung have tools that allow you to run TRIM manually, but I don't know does any of them support XP anymore. You could also install Windows 7 next to XP and sometimes boot to there and run TRIM manually, or just take the SSD and plug it on some other computer. The disk optimizer on Windows 10 performs TRIM if you run it on SSD for example.

Any 2.5" SATA SSD will work.

Crank9000 wrote:

...You could also install Windows 7 next to XP and sometimes boot to there and run TRIM manually, or just take the SSD and plug it on some other computer.

Another way is to boot occasionally some linux live cd and run it manually

Should have elaborated, this SSD is going to be the secondary drive, so in that case does TRIM support matter?

I actually started with XP2 and a 16GB SSD (or was it a 4GB model ?).
Back then, performance became horrible quickly under XP (yes, alignment was correct @4K boundaries).
With Seven, the same SSD performed nicely. Years later, I migrated my father's PC to a 64GB SSD, and both XP and 7 ran fine on it.
Despite the fact that this old nforce chipset had proprietary SATA modes and didn't work with Seven's default drivers
that do support Trim. So it ran with Garbage Collection (GC) only.
The SSD got finally killed by Firefox, because it did do a whole memory/cache dump every 10 secs or so.
There's a tutorial that explains how to configure FF to not kill SSDs..

Edit: It may sound weird, but it is best to use a higher capacity SSD on such an old system.
Modern SSDs can handle non-Trim OSes quite well. Also try to get a normal, affordable MLC model (SLC almost fanished),
since it doesn't require complex controller logic to differentiate half a dozen cell states.

buckeye wrote:

Should have elaborated, this SSD is going to be the secondary drive, so in that case does TRIM support matter?

That lessens the amount of writing the SSD needs to do, so it will last longer without trimming. Just don't fill up the drive with stuff, figure out how much space you will actually need and get a SSD that has, I don't know, at least double the required space and you should be fine. And if/when it starts to look like it could use trimming there are ways to do that.

Years ago I also needed an SSD for Windows XP systems. Based on what I read the Crucial M4 OS-independant automatic garbage collection seemed suffient. Then installed like 5 of those SSDs in different XP systems which got plenty of usage over the past years. None of these SSDs has failed or shown signs of slowdown. Firefox is used and the cache is there. TEMP files are redirected to a RAM drive or similar.

I did do a manual Trim with some SSD-tool the other day, but that was a disaster. OS and user files were lost at random!?

Based on the responses so far, I think a mechanical drive will be a better choice. That's ok since got a 500gb spare no problem.

Lack of TRIM support will affect the longevity of the drive, but doing a TRIM operation too often isn't very good either. On linux you usually set it to issue a trim command weekly. Like Crank9000 mentioned, there might be tools for XP to do it manually, which you could schedule to run every week.

I don't see the benfit to using an SSD with an XP-era machine though, it's most likely going to support up to SATAII speeds anyway...

SSDs work fine with Windowx XP.

There is no TRIM, but the disadvantages due to this are a bit overblown. If you are worried, secure wipe the drive and leave the final 10-20% un-partitoned. This will help garbage collection. Any worries about reduced life are really not that important, because the reduction in life is minimal, and you probably won't be hammering the box continually anyway to have to worry about lifetime.

The more important issue is the make sure when you create the win XP partition on the SSD, that it is 4kb aligned.

^This.

SSDs have come a long way. The "issues" I told before were first-gen problems.
In addition. the Firefox issue is/was OS-independant. In simple words, a 64GB model or so is all that's need.
When SSDs reached that capacity, they were already mature enough to handle XP.
I was using a 120 GB SSD for ~3 years on a XP machine until I swapped it for a larger one.
It was a Kingston model that had a Sandforce controller, I believe.

Nprod wrote:

I don't see the benfit to using an SSD with an XP-era machine though, it's most likely going to support up to SATAII speeds anyway...

SSD is completely silent and won't resonate at all if you got one of those cases that tries to drill itself through the floor if you have a HDD in there. OS will load up faster too if you install it there which is always a plus. Using it just for storage next to a HDD as I understood buckeye intended to do would lessen the benefit though, games with longer load times would like it but that's about it.

There are advantages to using SSD with any operating system, on any platform, because even if SATA1 or IDE speeds limit the sequential transfer rates, it's the small frequent data access scenarios which benefit the most, and these are very common in your average workload.

Using the SSD for mostly idle storage, though, makes very little sense, again, regardless of OS or platform.

Installed a OCZ Vertex 3 on my Shuttle Mini PC,
works just fine! You can issue Trim with O&O Defrag for example, there also other Utilitys.
IDE is driven to its limit.
i used cheap China SATA Bridge.

The Speed Improvement over HDD is Big.
Programs open up on the Fly.