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A custom-designed IDE SSD for old PCs
- marcodiego 4y agoWhat I really want: a very fast volatile SSD. Reason: my notebook RAM is maxed out and I don't want to throw it off; a fast volatile SSD would allow me to use it as a swap device. Is there such a thing?
- kccqzy 4y agoA regular SSD will do. But if your notebook is old, it may only support SATA based SSD, which is not considered fast any more.
- snuxoll 4y ago6Gb(it)ps of a maxed out SATA III link is still not slow, it's just that the multi-GB(yte)ps speeds of modern PCIe drives is just insanely fast. My TrueNAS box has 3x2 mirrored vdevs of 7200RPM drives and has plenty of bandwidth to handle multiple 4K ProRes streams, the only reason I have PCIe storage (an Optane 800P) on it is because I don't want to waste a precious 3.5" bay for a SLOG device to handle sync writes (VM workloads).
- picture 4y agoWhy not just a fast SSD, without being volatile?
- marcodiego 4y agoBecause by being volatile, it could be faster.
- p1mrx 4y agoHave you actually looked for a fast SSD? Your laptop's SATA/PCIe interface is probably the bottleneck at this point.
- joshenders 4y agoSolution, meet problem?
- WithinReason 4y agoIt couldn't, since it would be limited by bus width anyway.
- snuxoll 4y agoThere used to be a product called ZeusRAM which was a small (like 8GB) SSD with a matching amount of DRAM. In normal use all operations were done on the DRAM, and when power was lost it would use charge held in a super-cap to flush the data out to the NAND. Haven't seen any purely volatile drives, though.
- jonatron 4y agoThe Gigabyte i-RAM from 2005/2006, featured in a LTT video.
- andai 4y agoSo when power is restored it restores the RAM and turns back on like nothing happened?
- snuxoll 4y agoCorrect.
- birdyrooster 4y agoOh wow lol, this reminds me of Windows Vista days and Microsoft’s ReadyBoost for using a USB flash drive as extra memory for disk caching because it was hammering peoples disks. Good times.
- jonatron 4y agoA single board computer with something like a 10GbE connection to your laptop.
- systems_glitch 4y agoThese used to exist, PCI cards loaded up with DRAM, optionally battery-backed. Some talked over a drive interface like SCSI or SATA. I don't know that anyone bothers with them nowadays, since the target was never laptops and it's easy to cram a lot of RAM in a not-laptop.
- scintill76 4y agoHere's a list of some: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_drive#History_and_operating_system_specifics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_drive#History_and_operatin...
- soganess 4y agoNot volatile, but Optane? Even in the era of super fast pcie4 ssds, the random read times for optane is like 6-10x faster. Fast enough that intel put optane into ram module for persistence. Plus intel sold nand ssd drives (model H20?) that had a 32gb optane module on board. You can just use the optane for swap and the nand as your main drive.
- favorited 4y agoAlso, consumer Optane is hella cheap at the moment. For example, : https://www.newegg.com/intel-optane-ssd-p1600x-118gb/p/1Z4-009F-00621 https://www.newegg.com/intel-optane-ssd-p1600x-118gb/p/1Z4-0...?
- samstave 4y agoQ: ; I have multiple TBs of SSD currently, how is Optane better at ~118 GBs of stuff... Why would I want this over that?
- 0xCMP 4y agoIf you're doing lots of writes it will not wear out the same way an SSD would. Also it's very fast, but these days not as fast as the best NVMe SSDs you can buy now.
- FpUser 4y agoOptane has insane write endurance. Speed is good as well. It is expensive for sure but I guess it can be justified for some database use.
- wongarsu 4y agoI think of optane not so much as a mass storage device, and more as a fast scratch space. The perfect place to put your swap partition, to use as cache in front of slower storage, the scratch space of an algorithm that starts using disk space to save memory, or the intermediate output of your compiler.
- TomatoTomato 4y ago
- jewel 4y agoOn Linux there is zram which creates a first-priority swap partition that just compresses the pages and keeps them in memory. It looks like Windows also has memory compression. I believe that OS X has memory compression turned on by default.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoZram is actually a general purpose block device, you can format it with ext4 and have a compressed RAM disk. There is also zswap, which is a transparent compressed RAM cache in front of your cache partition. Most distros have it enabled by default, so make sure you don't use it together with swap in zram.
- denysonique 4y ago>I believe that OS X has memory compression turned on by default. It isn't just turned on by default, there is no way of turning it off.
- pkaye 4y agoHaving worked on SSD firmware, that would simplify a lot of the code in the firmware if we didn't have to recover things after a power loss. But I don't think it would improve performance a lot.
- paulmd 4y agoOptane SSDs. 2242 devices should fit in an ExpressCard bay (which is electrically a PCIe slot) but the only adapters are from ThinkMod and the owner of that company has kinda disappeared.
- sidpatil 4y agoWhat are the advantages of this versus a PATA disk-on-module, a CompactFlash card, or an SD-to-PATA adapter?
- asveikau 4y agoI agree that these things are readily available, but given that we're reading it on github, maybe it's somebody's tinkering project.
- systems_glitch 4y agoThat's really the only valid reason to do this, which is of course reason enough :P
- systems_glitch 4y agoAdd in there IDE to SATA and IDE to mSATA/M.2. If you just need to plug a non-ancient disk into IDE, there are tons of options.
- andrewf 4y agoCan anyone recommend a specific device they've observed to work on a G4 Mac mini? (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087CL5KHL https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087CL5KHL and https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Z67GX6W https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Z67GX6W together did not work. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07QN9STY7 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07QN9STY7 and a random SATA drive did not work and did not fit)
- Palomides 4y agoI use this in my 3400c, probably fine for your mac mini https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00AQT2LCU https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00AQT2LCU
- giantrobot 4y agoThere used to (maybe still are) PATA SSDs from a brand called King Spec on Amazon that I have used in a number of machines. I have used them in a G3 PowerBook (Lombard), a Sony VAIO laptop, and an IBM ThinkPad. These are all just for funsies machines so I make no claims of those drives' reliability. I don't have any irreplaceable data on any of those drives.
- squarefoot 4y agoEdit: edited out "Dosdude" which is the name of the author, not the project.
- calvinmorrison 4y agoI just saw a dual m2 with raid that fits in a 2.5 laptop slot. Who else wants laptop raid?
- kristopolous 4y agoI've been doing it for a long long time with the SD card slot
- ilyt 4y agoWouldn't raid1 just make both cards fail roughly at same time ? After all you're writing same amount of data on both
- kristopolous 4y agoNo. SD + internal. And "roughly at the same time" is fine. I can deal with that. Hasn't happened like that but even if it did, even an extra day is all you need to save it
- ilyt 4y agoI guess just getting 2 different brands of cards would be fine for that. I've seen devices like this for servers, basically 2 microsd cards with hardware raid1 mounted inside the server. It wasn't doing much writing on it tho, it was designed so you could run say hypervisor off it and be able to use all drive slots for storage.
- kristopolous 4y agoI also have an rsync backup that looks to see if I'm on a certain network and then runs the backup accordingly. It's sufficient. I'm not doing things that important
- mattst88 4y agodosdude1 is awesome. He replaced the BGA CPU in my iMac G4 with a 1.7 GHz MC7448 (https://mattst88.com/computers/imacg4/ https://mattst88.com/computers/imacg4/) and made a video about the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnpdLt4OIFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnpdLt4OIFs He's got two videos about this custom IDE SSD on his YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrBz-6lXbZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrBz-6lXbZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMCz0VsEbqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMCz0VsEbqc
- hot_gril 4y agoYeah he's one of the big online names in classic Mac stuff.
- marktangotango 4y agoI'm hoping he makes a video detailing the pcb design and layout. Very impressive project using Kicad!
- nubinetwork 4y agoCan I get a tldr? Can't watch until I get home, but I was looking over the github and I'm curious about how this works... It sounds like we're supposed to scavenge the nand and controller off an ssd and solder it to their board... but can I carve out 200/500mb disks out of it like other drive emulators, or are we still stuck trying to put a 256gb ssd into a machine that can't support disks that large? Edit: from my POV the issue isn't "I can't plug a nvme into my ide-only 286” but rather "I can't find a cf card small enough, and that the bios is happy enough with to allow the system to boot"
- unquietwiki 4y agohttps://tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html Since this is a custom application, I suspect you'd have to figure out where on this list your use case falls and use the appropriate NAND set.
- 4y ago
- freitzkriesler 4y agoSilly question, do we have to worry about older PC OSes not playing well with SSDs with excessive read/writes? I'd be concerned about destroying drives in short order with swaps that are miss behaving.
- londons_explore 4y agoOlder software tends to do far less 'background' stuff. Whenever I run old OS's in virtualbox, I'm surprised that even doing lots of stuff for a week rarely results in more than a few GB's of writes. So I don't think your concern is an issue for the typical case in practice. Obviously there'll be corner cases, but I haven't hit those yet.
- willcipriano 4y agoYou really have to go nuts with the writes to break a modern SSD. I don't think the bandwidth is even high enough to do so on purpose on a older machine.
- rzzzt 4y agoRepeated defrag runs could wear some grooves into those bits. Older versions of Windows will not look for (nor care about) the "rotational" flag.
- pkaye 4y agoDisable defrag
- rzzzt 4y agoI don't want to, watching the mishmash of rectangles slowly getting organized by color makes me feel very productive!
- AshamedCaptain 4y agoOnly Vista has automatically-scheduled background full defragmentation and doesn't care about the rotational flag.
- daneel_w 4y agoNice work, especially reverse-engineering the controller. I use a $5 bidirectional IDE<->SATA adapter.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoThese initialize kinda slow, using one in the Xbox doubles to triples the boot up time. It's been a couple years but iirc there basically were only two different chips.
- daneel_w 4y agoThe ones I have all "come online" faster than a mechanical HDD spins up and incur no slowdown. Things run at full Ultra ATA speeds. You may have run into one with quirky firmware or so - there are quite a few different chipsets.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoI tried around 2017 or so. It was just two brands of adapters back then, one from startech, the other one I forgot. Both of them made the boot up way slower, and it was common knowledge in the scene that there is no solution to that. Either better adapters emerged in the meantime, or the Xbox just has some quirk.
- Maursault 4y agoVery cool that capable individuals are paying attention to older technology, but it's not like IDE SSD hasn't existed for a while. Here's[1] one of the more recent selections, and it's been around awhile. Edit: oops, missed that it was a ZIF interface. Ok, well done. [1] https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDMXLE120/ https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDMXLE120/