T42 Hard drive painfully slow?

[fefrie]

I've got a t42, bought it used with 1.5gb of ram.

It had an image restore on it and it ran perfectly fast untill I tried to install battlefield 2 on it.

The game didn't run as fast or smooth as I needed to and I uninstalled it.

Now the hard drive seems maddeningly slow.

I ran HD Tach (google it, a safe program), and I come out with a transfer speed which I think is too slow for the specs of the stock drive.

I checked the IDE controllers and they seem to be set fine on DMA if available.

It's a pain in a but to wait for opening programs in the 15-20 second range.

Do you think if I uninstall the ide controllers and restart if it will cure the problem? I'm just wondering why the hard drive would slow down so dramatically?

[lukee]

MHT2040AT is quiet slow drive. Get Samsung HM160HC, then the benchmark will reach around 65 MB/s.

Cheers.

[fefrie]

I couldn't find stats for this drive. Is it really just 30MB/s?

[lukee]

Yes, see i.e. this:
http://www.hdtune.com/results/Fujitsu_MHT2040AT.gif

It's benchmark from HDTune's official website.

[fefrie]

Wow, that is really bad.

Too bad they don't make ata ssd. I'd get that. I guess I will live with this for now...

[lukee]

ATA SSD's exists but their efficiencies aren't so good with ATA controller as with SATA controller. TRIM is missing too.

[w0qj]

If you can find a (relatively) cheap PATA SSD that is smaller sized for your T42, perhaps you can consider it...

I did previously buy a PATA SSD for my T42, bootup times was noticably faster, SSD read speed is faster, but anecdotal SSD write speeds was only somewhat faster than my previous 7200 RPM HDD (possibly due to neither my PATA SSD nor my Win'XP support TRIM).
There is no PATA SSD that has native SSD level garbage collection to my knowledge.

Put it this way, my Solidata 256 GB PATA SSD that I bought for my T42, I actually had to set the SSD's jumpers to the SLOWER PATA setting in order to work, meaning that my T42 could not use the full potential of my PATA SSD !!
Moreover, my external USB enclosure also required my SSD's jumpers to the SLOWER PATA setting.


If I had the chance to do this again, chance to consider option to buy SSD for my T42, would I do it again?

The short answer is, either buy a small PATA SSD, or save the money and upgrade to a newer notebook computer.

~My T42 since then had the infamous loose GPU issue, rendering it too expensive to repair, ie: bricked notebook computer.
If I knew that my T42 was going to have this problem, I would not have bought my PATA SSD for T42.

Oh well, at least I now have an (almost) bullet-proof external USB SSD storage device!

Just my 2 cents, from actual experience.