Thanks to the many available 3.0 lanes, an above-average number of NVMe SSDs with full bandwidth can be used. Due to the high prices at the upper end of the capacity range, I was keen to experiment with two SSDs and, when I saw a very good offer from Mindfactory at the time of purchase, I was tempted to buy something that was quite unfamiliar to me:

Two MS200s from Mega Electronics (MS200200TTM), a South Korean manufacturer like Samsung that uses Micron or Intel NAND. These PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs with 2 TB capacity were repeatedly offered at bargain prices for a while, and the data sheets look good: fast DDR4 DRAM cache, high TBW, good write and read performance – everything as desired.

I’ve read quite a few comments about “Mega Fastro Kaputto,” and the 1 TB version is said to have been prone to failure – but I haven’t noticed anything unusual with my model so far.

It’s important to mention that the MS200 is double-sided and therefore doesn’t fit into every M.2 slot. You have to be careful with mobile devices or expansion cards, and this also plays a role in the compatibility of passive heat sinks. For example, only single-sided M.2 SSDs fit on the expansion card I use.

NVMe-SSDs

• Two MS200 with 2 TB each from Mega Electronics, on the motherboard under the passive heat sinks of the board
• Two Samsung 970 Evo Plus with 2 TB each*, on an x8 expansion card (x4x4 bifurcation*) including JEYI passive heat sinks
• One Samsung 970 Evo Plus with 500 GB*, also on the motherboard

⧉ MEGA Electronics

⧉ Samsung

⧉ JEYI

SATA-SSDs

• Three Samsung SM863a Enterprise SSDs, each with a capacity of 480 GB
• One Samsung 840 with 250 GB for a parallel installation of Windows 11 Professional

⧉ Samsung

⧉ Samsung

HDDs

• Two WD Red drives, each with 4 TB*, 3.5″, SATA – RAID1
• Two Toshiba drives, each with 2 TB*, 3.5″, SATA – RAID1
• One Seagate Barracuda with 500 GB, 2.5″, USB 3.0 internal data HDD for Windows 11
• One Toshiba with 1 TB, 2.5″, USB 3.0 internal – Images and SMB

⧉ WD

⧉ Toshiba

⧉ Sabrent

Der Beitrag <h5>TR-Server #4: </h5><h3><b>Storage – Ola NVMe!</b></h3> erschien zuerst auf flohs blog.

Since Windows XP can only handle MBR partitions, the boot drive is pretty obvious: it has to be a SATA SSD with 2 TB capacity, which is the maximum for MBR. Four of the eight SATA ports on the motherboard can handle SATA III, the other four only SATA II. Two of the fast ports come natively from the chipset, the other two are powered by an Asmedia add-on chip. It therefore makes sense to use these two fast native ports for the largest possible SSDs.

For all other drives, you should always keep the MBR limit of 2 TB in mind. NVMe, as a more modern data carrier, would be possible with a BIOS modification and PCI Express expansion card, but this is not really an option due to a lack of support from XP and potential problems with Windows 7. In addition, all graphics card slots are covered, so there is no room for more.

Once again, I installed an SSD from Samsung, specifically a Samsung 870 Evo with 2 TB capacity*. When it comes to data storage devices, I try to use Samsung SSDs wherever possible. So far, they have all worked well without exception and none have ever broken. I cannot say the same for other manufacturers. When it comes to hard drives, I’ve always preferred Western Digital or HGST.

I also wanted to install a DVD or Blu-ray burner, along with an internal card reader. This is typical for computers from the XP era. Therefore, one of the eight ports was used for the burner.

Hard drives?

I installed a relatively wild mix of hard drives that I had on hand anyway in order to make full use of the space and possibilities. In the end, I chose the two SATA SSDs on the fast native ports, two 3.5“ hard drives, two 2.5” hard drives for space reasons, and another 2.5″ SSD.

I will list the exact configuration later in the “Hardware Setup” section.

Der Beitrag <h5>Retro-XP-PC #8: </h5><h3><b>Storage</b></h3> erschien zuerst auf flohs blog.

If the notebook still has a hard disk drive (HDD) installed, then this is by far the most performance-enhancing upgrade (provided that the RAM is not so small that it constantly fills up and slows everything down).

There is nothing specific to HP to consider here—like all notebooks from this era, the original model has a 2.5-inch hard drive that is screwed into a metal cage with PH1 Phillips screws and inserted into a SATA connector. In rare cases, the HDD is also located in plastic or rubber mounts, but the principle is always the same.

⧉ Dsimic

Unfortunately, due to its age, the 8540p only has SATA-II connections. The implications of this in terms of potential performance can be seen in this table:

An SSD despite SATA II?

This notebook is not ideally suited for a SATA III SSD, as most SSDs come close to the limit of the SATA III interface and potentially lose a lot of performance due to throttling to SATA II speeds.

More modern SSDs in particular are actually significantly faster than the 300 MB/s sequential read speeds offered by SATA II, at least when it comes to reading.

These standards were originally developed for hard drives, which still do not even reach SATA II speeds, let alone SATA III speeds, especially in the slower 2.5“ form factor, which has to make do with only 5 volts (3.5” is generally more powerful).

The difference between even an inexpensive SSD and the mechanical latencies of an HDD is incomparable; the responsiveness is much better, even if SATA-II throttles. Not to mention the avoided heat and significantly lower power consumption.

It is important to mention that Windows XP does not support the so-called “TRIM” command. However, I consider this to be acceptable.

More recently, SATA has been replaced by NVMe as the protocol and M.2 as the mechanical slot standard for SSDs, which now allows for much faster and more efficient communication via PCI Express (there are also SATA SSDs that fit into M.2 slots, but that is a different, dying or extinct topic).

Which SSD model, there are so many?

Since SATA is also becoming an increasingly less used protocol and the hardware I use for upgrading may end up being used in another device in the future, I decided on what I consider to be the best SATA SSD on the consumer market:

A Samsung 870 EVO with an impressive (and expensive) 2 TB of storage space*.
This is also available in a much more expensive version with 4 TB of storage space* and as a QVO – then, instead of more durable TLC with QLC memory, which I really dislike, even with 8 TB, which would be the absolute maximum SATA SSD that would fit in this notebook at the moment.

I only recently carried out this upgrade because I found a really good deal on this 2 TB version. Previously, I had been using Samsung 860 Evo SSDs with “only” 500 GB for years (price/performance!).

Samsung has a pretty good reputation and proven durability, also thanks to the more durable TLC technology of this specific model (870 EVO). At the same time, it has a so-called DRAM cache, which further increases performance. I have only good things to say about Samsung SSDs, even with the newer NVMe models.

⧉ Samsung

⧉ Samsung

This raises the question: Why 2 TB and not 4 TB or even 8 TB? Financial rationality aside?

The goal was at least Windows XP compatibility and that can only be achieved with MBR.
Newer operating systems use GPT, which is significantly more sophisticated, robust, and considerably less limited.

The technical limit of MBR is 2 TiB, hence the choice of a 2 TB SSD – that is the maximum in terms of calculation.
MBR also leads to further restrictions when multi-booting operating systems; more on this in later posts about the software.

There is a very good explanation of this topic at heise:
https://www.heise.de/tipps-tricks/Festplatten-Partitionen-MBR-oder-GPT-4351715.html (archive.org)

Now let’s move on to the GPU.

Der Beitrag <h5>RetroBook 8540p #5: </h5><h3><b>Upgrade – SSD</b></h3> erschien zuerst auf flohs blog.