Just use a 2.5" to 3.5" bay mount and an IDE-to-SATA adaptor. Although I had a search and I'm surprised StarTech don't sell kits for this, they sell some weird and wonderful bits and pieces.

Also, SSDs are so lightweight that having one held in by just one screw in a 3.5" drive bay seems very reasonable to me . You can add a cable tie or two if it makes you feel safer .

You can fit 4x 2.5" SSDs in a single 5.25" bay

There were some around like 8 years ago, in the lower capacities of 30GB or so, but $200 or so (Think SATA 30GB were still $150ish at the time) I don't think ppl rocking 300-500GB PATA drives thought of them as a good upgrade for the price, since they'd be topping out around 133MByte/sec and RAID 0 would get you that on PATA platters.

SSDs, especially in older systems are more about the super low seek times more than they are about the transfer rate.

As for why nobody really produces them for old interfaces anymore is because there is not near enough demand compared to what it would cost to spin up a production line not to mention a design team.

There are also super cheap adapters so that is just one more reason that people would not buy them

I really love the crucial SSD's because they have garble collection if you can not use trim via OS. Very handy on everything on XP and below.

Why? I'm not sure, maybe the market is too small? Personally I like the ide-SD card devices. SSD is kind of overkill except for seek speeds as others have noted. Also older OS won't have trim support etc. which can be a problem for many drives. Also everyone has already said this i gotta read more carefully 🤣.

Can you link some of those IDE-sd devices?

dr.zeissler wrote on 2021-09-17, 16:34:

I really love the crucial SSD's because they have garble collection if you can not use trim via OS. Very handy on everything on XP and below.

Pretty much all newer SSDs have garbage collection the last time I looked into it.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2021-09-17, 16:42:

Can you link some of those IDE-sd devices?

Sure. This is what I've used in all my IDE builds (p1, p2, p3, and a performa 6300).

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08SK28S2Y

Sometimes a new one will pop up on amazon, but they have exactly the same board layout, its all the same chinese stuff from what I can tell. And if you dont like em... easy return. I would just advise that you find a piece of plastic and cut it to size, and attach to the back of the board with zipties or something, so you don't accidentally short out.

I've also been using these SD cards. 32 is overkill, i know, but theyve been reliable (knock wood) and good for the price. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07K82GRDV ... However with everything, I will occasionally make a full ghost backup just in case.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-09-17, 16:11:

SSDs, especially in older systems are more about the super low seek times more than they are about the transfer rate.

After you've used them you figure that out, but near a decade back, when many people hadn't, it was a step into the void.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-09-17, 16:11:

There are also super cheap adapters so that is just one more reason that people would not buy them

Yes... Bullcr*p made with Jmicron and Sunplus+ bridges, incompatible with nVidia and VIA chipsets, Silicon Image and some Promise controllers, and sloooooow as hell for anything isn't a CDROM.

The only worth bridges are made with Marvell controllers... And there aren't many of these out there. Anything else is guaranteed to be a head pain sooner or later, specially if you have many configurations to test.

I've been using the cheap adapters and they work just fine for the most part.

I did have an issue with some of the 44-pin to m.2 adapters but then discovered it was something wrong with my setup.

For systems with PCI slots, I generally just use a Promise SATA 1 controller.