Home made SSD in a Laptop booting WinXP in 25s

[Tfpsly]

@Melbourne67AU Faut comparer ce qui est comparable : un mac d'il y a 15 ans a un système très différent d'un portable de plus de 10 ans sous XP. Sans vouloir parler de qui est plus rapide ou mieux ou plus ceci, ici on voit ce qu'une CF permet d'obtenir sur une vieille machine pas à priori aussi réactive.

J'aurai pû mettre un système Linux et coucher tout le monde, mais personne n'aurait alors eu de références.

[Tfpsly]

@Melbourne67AU Et non, tout le monde ne peut pas booter WinXP aussi vite sur un portable ayant 10 ans d'age... Surtout pas avec le disque 4200 rpm d'origine. Et tu n'as pas compris que ce disque est un bricolage à partir d'une compact flash il y a 3 ans, et non un vrai SSD.

[Tfpsly]

To people who posted stuff like "my 2010 computer does a bit more in the same time" - who give a shit? This is a demonstration on a 10 years old computer we still use from time to time. If your brand new computer can hardly do better... you failed ;)

[xxDungeonzxx]

can you tell me what the read and write speed is?thx!

[Tfpsly]

Read ~ 42mb/s

Write ~ 32mb/s

[jeff666p]

@Tfpsly Thats super slow

[clubpenguin1help]

@Tfpsly that's about the same as my 5400RPM HDD. Perhaps the latency is better?

[Tfpsly]

@clubpenguin1help SSD gives incredible speed-up thanks to their access time. Yes the bandwith is the same as the previous 5400rpm disk, but the access time went down from 16ms to 0.2ms: this made the old laptop incredibly fast!

For system disk, the most important parameter is by far access time, not raw bandwidth, as most O/S files are very small.

[kullwarrior]

yea but thats macs, according to apple Mac and PC are completely different

[Macuserppcintel]

agreed

[anton1203]

how long your CF card wil live with windows's swap ? =)

[Tfpsly]

Swap killing CF/SSD is a legend. Access 100,000 times a pagefile page would take up to 79 years.

That, plus I don't have any swap :)

[MigsPulido]

Pretty cool. I have a post booting to my app in about 29 seconds.

[teeth771]

Boot first, ask questions later!

[Doenerworld]

bienvenue

tu parlez francais :D:D

[Tfpsly]

Je suis Français.

[johnnyfast]

A lot of talk about SSD lifespan is pointless. For all home users they will last many, many years and suffer from none of the mechanical failures a standard HDD does.

[Tfpsly]

wahkao1990:Holy cow that was quiet and fast....

Yep very quiet. What you hear is the video camera's engine =D

PS: again I clicked on "Remove" instead of "Reply", sorry.

[Tfpsly]

I have accidentaly deleted a comment from t*****10**3, which was:

"Hello, what size compact flash cared r u using?I 'm building a industrial PC using flash memory drive."

It's a 4gb CF by Adata.

[johnny1237]

sure is fast for a 6 year old laptop lol. mines a 3 year old and it runs fast as that LOLs

[30GB]

well years dont matter its whats the inside like the cpu speed, ram, video card, video ram, hard drive, and other

[ccubsfan94]

my mac loads up in about 10 seconds and is two years old

[Tfpsly]

Good for you. This laptop is 6 or 7 years old, and it's running an OS which is to support much more hardware configurations than yours =)

[Tfpsly]

Btw, if I was to do that again, I would think again: the new OCZ Core SSD have much better performances and more space for only twice the price.

[Zoowey07]

"...home made SSD" What?

[ProGigit]

this isn't a full boot!

A full boot is load the OS untill the drive stops loading data!

[PCFreak1123]

mac boots just about 15 seconds faster ,my minimum spec $500 mac mini but my imac boots it in 7 seconds I timed it :)

[CwalkerSquibb]

But it then Asks me for a CD which I don't have Lols. Can't I just download the language files and save them in a spacific folder?

[DaveDS126]

u need to have the windows xp installation disc. that's the only way to install it.

[Tfpsly]

Go to the config pannel, International & language settings, second tab, and tick the last checkbox about extreme east languages.

[MrBS4]

How do you fit the connection to the motherboard (the socket)? I wanna grab a 64 SSD for my Lenovo, but do not want spend $800 on it but can not use.

[Tfpsly]

The mobo has a standard 2.5 inches ide44 disk connector. Using a CF to ide44 adapter does the trick. You'll find more information on the first link in the description.

[MrBS4]

OK，Thx

[Tfpsly]

Hi, 300 have much faster writing but are a bit slower at reading than the best 266. I'll add a link to a good site with information about CF speeds and which are fixed or not.

[Tfpsly]

I've tried to post answer for one month without success, and they just all appeared at once. Nice... Deleted duplicated posts.

[cotton509]

good it is harder for your laptop to have hardware failure

[metalmodman]

how can you tell if the adapter is udma

[Tfpsly]

Sorry for the delayed answers, my posts would simply not appear for the last month.

Anyway, I added in the description links to a site which is a huge resource for infos on usable and fast CF.

[metalmodman]

how would a 155 w 300x read cf do?

[coombsy16]

i heard you can boot windows from a sd card instead of the hdd

is that true?

[Tfpsly]

Not a SD, a Compact Flash.

CompactFlash actually use the same IDE protocole as hard disks, and the same plug as most 1.8" hard disks.

==> Just need an adapter to 2.5" or 3.5" connector to use it. See the link in this video description.

[SgtSavage166]

how long did the flash card last? I read that if you do heavy read/writes they will die faster

I wanna use a 1gb CF to run my old laptop with Win98 on it

[Tfpsly]

I don't know and I'm afraid I'll be in a position to give you that anwser in only 10 years: it's still working like a charm, every days, in my wife's laptop! =)

And actually the faster CF uses the same memories as today's SSD. I would not have any fear about the lifetime of this disk ;)

[SgtSavage166]

ah great :)

[MrJudg3]

Hi mate! I just had a similar idea about using a 4gb Lexar CF card (300x, about 45MB/s) for my system disk. I was thinking about using it for my HTPC in the living room - always on. The only thing I'm interested in is the system response. Can you make another video just browsing the HDD, I'd be very happy if you could play a movie. Could you do that for me? Thank you.

[Tfpsly]

I'll try.

[MrJudg3]

Thank you.

[chrisvolker]

Very nice! I am thinking about buying the Mtron 32GB, though. It has double the transfer speeds. Still, very nice project.

[Tfpsly]

Indeed recent SSD has even much higher performances. The cost is much higher too :(

Still this project was fun and it's actually reliable. =)

[chrisvolker]

Are there any drawbacks in using this kind of SSD? Do you have any disadvantages in certain programs, etc...?

[Tfpsly]

Yes of course:

* more fragile? (didn't have any problem so far).

* Need a good brand CF, otherwise no balancing on write distribution, ==> will kill some cells after a while. Go for A-Data, Trenscent or Sandisk preferably

* Very small disk: up to 16gb only

* Slower than modern SSD

* Some cheap adapters don't connect every pin and they won't support UDMA -> very slow!

Anyway, for a system disk, it's much much cheaper than SSD currently.