5 ms·

I wonder if this might work on my old Dell Precision M4400 I've been tricking out for no reason. So far it's had its CPU upgraded to a QX9300 (Core 2 Quad), boo

I wonder if this might work on my old Dell Precision M4400 I've been tricking out for no reason. So far it's had its CPU upgraded to a QX9300 (Core 2 Quad), boot drive upgraded to an SSD, had a copper shim installed between its GPU and heatsink to dramatically improve thermals, and had an Intel Wifi 6 + Bluetooth 5 card installed by way of an adapter that fits into the laptop's WWAN slot. It's got both an ExpressCard and a PCMCIA slot that I've struggled to come up with good uses for, and an NVMe drive might fit the bill. With that in place it'd have crazy storage capacity with the ExpressCard slot, two 2.5" bays (one of which is hotswap) and an SD card slot. The thing is a real brick of a machine but it can't be faulted for lack of expandability.

justsomehnguy 4y ago
> I wonder if this might work on my old Dell Precision M4400 Why not? It's just PCIe bus. The only things is what you wouldn't be able to boot from it and what Core 2 is too slow to seriously push any decent NVMe drive. But as a storage it would be just fine. > I've been tricking out for no reason It has a sane keyboard layout (with all the keys FFS!), clitoris with TouchPad, 4 USB ports and can be used as a self defense weapon if the need arises. > I've struggled to come up with good uses USB3 card is a nice thing to have but you will have a hard time finding one on in PCMCIA variant.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  > Core 2 is too slow to seriously push any decent NVMe drive * Intel PM45 / ICH9M is too slow to seriously push any decent NVMe drive Pre-integrated IO controller, so PCIe would have been coming off the southbridge, no? Which looks like it's PCIe 1.1. Which would mean 4 GB/s max. (ceiling, assuming all of a 1x16 link gets linked up)
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    10+ years ago I tested moving some (ancient at THAT time) Celerons[0] to SSD drives. It made absolutely no difference, because the CPU is too damn slow. My own rig was on A64 X2 4200+ (with no less than 8Gb of RAM at any time) for years, with Vista since 2008. I don't remember when I migrated it to SSD (perhaps ~2012-2014?) but I noticed a great improvement in QoL, though it wasn't instant. Years later, somewhere around 2016 I "upgraded" to G2010[1] and despite everything else (well except DDR2 => DDR3) were the same (including OS and the system drive on that SSD) I noticed performance increase in both boot-up and everyday operations. You still need a good IPC to actually push any meaningful amount of data. While OP's T9400 is not Presscot bullshit[2] it is still an ancient shrunk down Merom, ie just the firsts of the Core CPUs. > Which would mean 4 GB/s max And the memory is just 6.4GB/s max. Still, in 2022 this is probably the simplest way to add a decent amount of fast storage for a such ancient machine. [0] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/27116/intel-celeron-d-processor-335-256k-cache-2-80-ghz-533-mhz-fsb.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/27116/i... [1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/71071/intel-pentium-processor-g2010-3m-cache-2-80-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/71071/i... [2] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/35562/intel-core2-duo-processor-t9400-6m-cache-2-53-ghz-1066-mhz-fsb.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/35562/i...
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      I haven't kept tabs on modern PCIe / NVMe, but I was figuring transfer would be DMA blasted w/o CPU interaction. Any idea why the Celerons gunked up so badly? Maybe single core blocking?
      - justsomehnguy 4y ago
        If you are talking about Celerons in my comment then it was SATA drives. But Celerons are shit anyway, couple of weeks ago I replaced a HDD with SSD on Acer Aspire ES1-533 with Celeron N3350 [1], with a fresh Win10 install. It was slow with the original WD Blue, with SSD it just started to slow faster. Still seconds to open menus and overall a very poor performance, despite the whopping 2Mb cache. I have ThinkPad x301 lying somewhere, with a SU9400 Core 2 Duo and 1.8" SSD. Last time I used it (with Win10, too) it performed better than that Acer with Celeron. X301 is from 2008, ES1-533 is from 2016. Intel learned from Mendocino/Coppermine 'fiasco' and since that Celerons never performed well. Obligatory bash.org quote [1] [0] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/95598/intel-celeron-processor-n3350-2m-cache-up-to-2-40-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/95598/i... [1] http://bash.org/?769729 http://bash.org/?769729

justsomehnguy 4y ago

> I wonder if this might work on my old Dell Precision M4400 Why not? It's just PCIe bus. The only things is what you wouldn't be able to boot from it and what Core 2 is too slow to seriously push any decent NVMe drive. But as a storage it would be just fine. > I've been tricking out for no reason It has a sane keyboard layout (with all the keys FFS!), clitoris with TouchPad, 4 USB ports and can be used as a self defense weapon if the need arises. > I've struggled to come up with good uses USB3 card is a nice thing to have but you will have a hard time finding one on in PCMCIA variant.

ethbr0 4y ago
> Core 2 is too slow to seriously push any decent NVMe drive * Intel PM45 / ICH9M is too slow to seriously push any decent NVMe drive Pre-integrated IO controller, so PCIe would have been coming off the southbridge, no? Which looks like it's PCIe 1.1. Which would mean 4 GB/s max. (ceiling, assuming all of a 1x16 link gets linked up)
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  10+ years ago I tested moving some (ancient at THAT time) Celerons[0] to SSD drives. It made absolutely no difference, because the CPU is too damn slow. My own rig was on A64 X2 4200+ (with no less than 8Gb of RAM at any time) for years, with Vista since 2008. I don't remember when I migrated it to SSD (perhaps ~2012-2014?) but I noticed a great improvement in QoL, though it wasn't instant. Years later, somewhere around 2016 I "upgraded" to G2010[1] and despite everything else (well except DDR2 => DDR3) were the same (including OS and the system drive on that SSD) I noticed performance increase in both boot-up and everyday operations. You still need a good IPC to actually push any meaningful amount of data. While OP's T9400 is not Presscot bullshit[2] it is still an ancient shrunk down Merom, ie just the firsts of the Core CPUs. > Which would mean 4 GB/s max And the memory is just 6.4GB/s max. Still, in 2022 this is probably the simplest way to add a decent amount of fast storage for a such ancient machine. [0] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/27116/intel-celeron-d-processor-335-256k-cache-2-80-ghz-533-mhz-fsb.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/27116/i... [1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/71071/intel-pentium-processor-g2010-3m-cache-2-80-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/71071/i... [2] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/35562/intel-core2-duo-processor-t9400-6m-cache-2-53-ghz-1066-mhz-fsb.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/35562/i...
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    I haven't kept tabs on modern PCIe / NVMe, but I was figuring transfer would be DMA blasted w/o CPU interaction. Any idea why the Celerons gunked up so badly? Maybe single core blocking?
    - justsomehnguy 4y ago
      If you are talking about Celerons in my comment then it was SATA drives. But Celerons are shit anyway, couple of weeks ago I replaced a HDD with SSD on Acer Aspire ES1-533 with Celeron N3350 [1], with a fresh Win10 install. It was slow with the original WD Blue, with SSD it just started to slow faster. Still seconds to open menus and overall a very poor performance, despite the whopping 2Mb cache. I have ThinkPad x301 lying somewhere, with a SU9400 Core 2 Duo and 1.8" SSD. Last time I used it (with Win10, too) it performed better than that Acer with Celeron. X301 is from 2008, ES1-533 is from 2016. Intel learned from Mendocino/Coppermine 'fiasco' and since that Celerons never performed well. Obligatory bash.org quote [1] [0] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/95598/intel-celeron-processor-n3350-2m-cache-up-to-2-40-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/95598/i... [1] http://bash.org/?769729 http://bash.org/?769729