Any issues with P256 and SATA-I?

Yes, yes, I know this drive is so ridiculously fast and sweet it exceeds the 150MB/s available to my poor old HP/Compaq nw8440 workstation's SATA-I interface, but would it be reasonable to assume that this drive complies with normal backward compatibility standards and that I _should_ be able to use it? I found a fantastic price on this drive and I'm wanting to have the best chance for success since the won't allow a refund if it doesn't. The drive I have in it now is a SATA-II drive (Seagate Momentus 7200.2 120GB), and I know the bios tricks you have to do to get the OS to install on SATA-II drives.

BTW, if the answer is 'yes', I promise to report back on my install experience.

Thanks in advance!

-Jim

It's a notebook, so I'm kind of stuck with what I've got ;-) I said workstation, which was misleading, my fault. They call them "mobile workstations". I posted to HP's site to see if anyone had done an SSD with this line of laptop and so far have no replies. I did some google-ing and came across a HP reseller in Berlin that advertised the Samsung 128GB SSD as an option/upgrade in conjunction with the nw8440. I emailed them to see if they'd actually tried it and they said they had and it worked well. The fact that the P256 has "Samsung guts" (someone out there tell me they get the "Sony-guts" reference...) plus that statement has emboldened me enough and I went ahead and ordered the P256.

BTW, NewEgg.com has it for $669 with free shipping right now... best offer I've seen. Being that this is like a kid at Christmas thing for me :biggrin:, I upgraded to overnight shipping, so I'll hopefully report back soon with a glowing report.

TTFN...

Greetings from the land of running on an SSD... and holy crap! Is this thing fast! I'm noticing the speed in the places you'd expect. Faster boot times, etc... but where you feel it is where multiple things hit the disk at once. Take your login for instance. Lots of things in your startup folder, right? I'd watch the disk thrash as is moved from one part of the disk to another scrambling to respond to all the simultaneous requests being thrown at it and the CPU would be swinging from 20-60% as it waited for the disk. Now, the CPU is at 100% almost solid as it's now the bottleneck. Amazing, truly amazing. It's everything I thought it would be and more, even on my SATA-I interface.

I nixed much of my multiple partition scheme that was designed to reduce fragmentation in heavily hit files. The only thing I still have a separate one for is my swap file, but even that shouldn't be needed anymore.

I'm reading online about the multiple tweaks you can do to help reduce wear on your SSD and generally improve performance. I am wondering, which ones have people felt have had the biggest effect? If I ever switch to a 64-bit OS and squeeze that last bit of memory in the 3-4GB area, I might do what a lot of sites are suggesting (the ramdisk and point your browser caches there). just curious what people think is worth it, and what is nit-picking.

As far as the technical notes, here was my procedure:

1) Backup original disk

2) Reboot and turn off SATA native mode in the BIOS (this seems to be an HP thing...)

3) Boot from my Paragon Boot CD (WinXPE version).

4) Defragmented the original disk (I was about to benchmark it one more time, so I thought I'd give the old platter spinner the best score it could muster). The boot CD defragmenter can defrag all files since the OS is not running. Zero fragmented files.

5) Reboot and time the login. Total time to have EVERYTHING loaded (fully logged in) was 3:34.

6) Shutdown and use my Vantec USB->IDE/SATA adapter to connect the P256.

7) Boot back to boot CD, go to disk copy tool and do a copy with the raw copy option. This doesn't resize the partitions at all, just copy the whole disk. Took about 3.5 hours for my 100GB disk. It was only that slow because of the USB interface.

8) Swap the disks so the P256 is in the machine now, and the original drive no connected.

9) Boot up and time the boot. 1:34. I'm calling that an improvement.

10) Reboot back to the bootCD and move the extra partitions to the end of the disk so I can enlarge the primary partition to fill all the extra space on the drive. Ahhhhh, room to breathe! :D:

11) Reenable Native SATA in the BIOS and use as normal.

12) I went back later and removed my partition I used for my Outlook OST/PST files and merged it with the OS partition.

I'm a very pleased so far. This drive is performing fantastically! One I get some more time (some weeks/months) under my belt, I'll try to report back with anything else I've learned. I'm anxious to see if the battery life is any better when traveling too.

-Jim