[HN Gopher] A custom-designed IDE SSD for old PCs
___________________________________________________________________
A custom-designed IDE SSD for old PCs
Author : squarefoot
Score : 125 points
Date : 2023-01-23 17:47 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| Maursault wrote:
| Very 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/
| freitzkriesler wrote:
| Silly 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.
| amir wrote:
| Lack of OS-level TRIM support will slow down writes. TRIM also
| allows SSDs to maintain wear leveling.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Older 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 wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| Repeated defrag runs could wear some grooves into those bits.
| Older versions of Windows will not look for (nor care about)
| the "rotational" flag.
| pkaye wrote:
| Disable defrag
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Only Vista has automatically-scheduled background full
| defragmentation and doesn't care about the rotational flag.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Then we're good, because nobody is going to install
| _that_ friggin OS
| bob1029 wrote:
| I was astonished at the remaining life on a Samsung 960 pro
| when I checked the other day. I don't think I will have to
| replace it this decade at the current pace.
| [deleted]
| IE6 wrote:
| Completely anecdotal observation with n=1 but FWIW I was an
| early adopter of SSDs and put one in my thinkpad in college
| running Win XP (this was before trim and all that) - it did
| require my to "align the partitions" but once that was done I
| did all my project work and would routinely hybernate my
| laptop. It lasted all through college and years after. I
| eventually just retired the device. SDD was fine. At the time
| SSDs were "unusable" for desktop workloads because of their
| perceived failure rates.
| sidpatil wrote:
| What are the advantages of this versus a PATA disk-on-module, a
| CompactFlash card, or an SD-to-PATA adapter?
| joenathanone wrote:
| Nand should have better latency and write duration
| samstave wrote:
| Sure but what are the subjective positives?
|
| Source: Ran Intel's game lab to seek out subjective positives
| with SIMD when the MIPS and AMD and the other CPU company
| were a threat... transmeta
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta
|
| Look at what they lost....
|
| I was talking with a DB Dev ~1998 at intel and his biggest
| problem was figuring out hot to expand the money fields in
| the DB to include the number of digits to reflect how much
| money they had...
| rsync wrote:
| "What are the advantages of this versus a PATA disk-on-module,
| a CompactFlash card, or an SD-to-PATA adapter?"
|
| I wondered the same thing ...
|
| I have thousands of days of uptime on various CF->IDE
| configurations - many of which were critical infrastructure.
|
| It's a really elegant solution because CF and IDE are pinout
| compatible. No logic is required.
|
| I set filesystems to be read-only so as not to burn out the CF
| part and, again, some of these were in service for >10 years
| and I have much higher confidence in this configuration than
| any SSD based solution I have ever fielded.
| daneel_w wrote:
| Don't use SD/microSD storage for these things. It's terrible
| for a number of reasons. Get yourself a cheap IDE-SATA adapter
| instead and plug an old used 2.5" SATA SSD in there.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > Don't use SD/microSD storage for these things. It's
| terrible for a number of reasons.
|
| Is it, really? My microSDs have already handled more lifetime
| writes than all IDE HDDs I ever had combined.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| SD cards don't have wear leveling like real SSDs.
| megous wrote:
| SD cards have wear leveling. Probably comparable in
| principle to dramless SSDs. I/O interface sucks, though.
| daneel_w wrote:
| I don't buy it, because it contradicts the very nature of
| flash storage. Unless you used your IDE HDDs as pinatas,
| that is. But the problems specific to SD/microSD and USB
| flash drives are more than limited longevity. The
| underlying SDIO protocol/interface of this storage type has
| several shortcomings making it awful for general operating
| system use entailing frequent intermixed writes and reads,
| including bringing the whole storage (and with it the OS)
| to a complete read-blocked freeze during extended and small
| rapid writes.
| mike_d wrote:
| Tell that to the original Raspberry Pi's floating around
| that are old enough to be enrolled in high school.
| ilyt wrote:
| "Hey, original Raspberry Pi, you have no bulk flash
| storage on board so I don't know why this guy is trying
| to get you into unrelated discussion about durability of
| bulk flash storage in the first place!"
|
| Here, I told it.
|
| Also they are "just" 11 years old so you've managed to be
| wrong on everything you said somehow..
| mardifoufs wrote:
| On their original SD card? Probably not, especially on
| the earlier raspi models.
| daneel_w wrote:
| I have, on numerous occasions. It's one of the reasons
| why general desktop use on them can be so infuriating.
| li2uR3ce wrote:
| That's not been my experience with the original Pis. We
| ended up mounting cards as read only because they
| wouldn't last otherwise. Syslog and various other
| processes, even with light IO would render the cards
| useless after a month or two.
| daneel_w wrote:
| Also: a lot of OS distributions aimed at SBCs with
| microSD storage forgetting to set _noatime /relatime_ on
| their file systems, to avoid thousands upon thousands of
| writes for access time updates whenever files are _read_.
| It 's only just recently that OS vendors finally woke up
| and realized what was going on.
| megous wrote:
| relatime is default option since forever. (certainly
| since before rpi was even a thing)
|
| https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v2.6.30/source/fs/namesp
| ace... (some random old kernel)
| cevn wrote:
| I have old raspis, the SD card failed.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > I don't buy it, because it contradicts the very nature
| of flash storage.
|
| No, it really doesn't. Besides, both capacities _and_
| performance have increased a lot since the top-of-the-
| line IDE HDDs. It's easy enough to see that e.g. a user
| of a Steam Deck probably writes daily a couple orders of
| magnitude more to a microSD than even a heavy a Windows
| 98 user did to its HDD. Even the writes caused by
| desfragmenting your average era HDD daily is practically
| peanuts to a TB microSD, but it was definitely not
| peanuts to the HDD itself.
|
| > The underlying SDIO protocol/interface of this storage
| type has several shortcomings making it awful for general
| operating system use entailing frequent intermixed writes
| and reads
|
| We are comparing this to IDE. Not NVME on top of PCIe.
|
| TL;DR I have a pile of broken microSD hards, but I also
| have a larger pile of broken old HDDs.
| asveikau wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| That's really the only valid reason to do this, which is of
| course reason enough :P
| andrewf wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a specific device they've observed to work
| on a G4 Mac mini? (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087CL5KHL
| and https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Z67GX6W together did
| not work. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07QN9STY7 and a
| random SATA drive did not work and did not fit)
| duffyjp wrote:
| The eBay listings are long gone, but in 2019 I ordered an
| adapter and a cheap used Samsung sata m.2 and they work
| perfectly in my G4 Mac Mini.
|
| The SSD listing descriptions were:
|
| * "2 Pack M.2 NGFF SATA SSD to 2.5 inch IDE 44PIN Converter
| Adapter with Case"
|
| * "256GB SATA-III Solid State Drive M.2 2280 Samsung PM871
| MZ-NLN2560 Lenovo SSD"
| visualphoenix wrote:
| I used https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Addonics/ADSAIDE/ to
| upgrade some Glyph drives to ssd when connected to a g5 audio
| rig a few years ago
| Palomides wrote:
| I use this in my 3400c, probably fine for your mac mini
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00AQT2LCU
| giantrobot wrote:
| There 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.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Add 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.
| daneel_w wrote:
| Nice work, especially reverse-engineering the controller. I use a
| $5 bidirectional IDE<->SATA adapter.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| These 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I just saw a dual m2 with raid that fits in a 2.5 laptop slot.
| Who else wants laptop raid?
| kristopolous wrote:
| I've been doing it for a long long time with the SD card slot
| ilyt wrote:
| Wouldn't raid1 just make both cards fail roughly at same time
| ? After all you're writing same amount of data on both
| marcodiego wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| 6Gb(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 wrote:
| Why not just a fast SSD, without being volatile?
| marcodiego wrote:
| Because by being volatile, it could be faster.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Have you actually looked for a fast SSD? Your laptop's
| SATA/PCIe interface is probably the bottleneck at this
| point.
| joshenders wrote:
| Solution, meet problem?
| WithinReason wrote:
| It couldn't, since it would be limited by bus width anyway.
| soganess wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| Also, consumer Optane is hella cheap at the moment. For
| example, : https://www.newegg.com/intel-optane-
| ssd-p1600x-118gb/p/1Z4-0...?
| samstave wrote:
| Q: ;
|
| I have multiple TBs of SSD currently, how is Optane better
| at ~118 GBs of stuff... Why would I want this over that?
| 0xCMP wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| Optane 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Orders of magnitude better wear capabilities and much
| faster at low queue depth operations
| paulmd wrote:
| Much lower latency. Optane doesn't have any of the "page"
| / "cell" bullshit that flash imposes, so there's really
| no need for buffers at all. Writes just go straight to
| disk basically, at almost zero latency, NVMe itself
| imposes much more latency than the actual reads/writes.
| jewel wrote:
| On 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.
| denysonique wrote:
| >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.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Zram 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.
| jonatron wrote:
| A single board computer with something like a 10GbE connection
| to your laptop.
| pkaye wrote:
| Having 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.
| snuxoll wrote:
| There 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.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Oh 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.
| andai wrote:
| So when power is restored it restores the RAM and turns back
| on like nothing happened?
| jonatron wrote:
| The Gigabyte i-RAM from 2005/2006, featured in a LTT video.
| paulmd wrote:
| Optane 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.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| These 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 wrote:
| Here's a list of some: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_driv
| e#History_and_operatin...
| mattst88 wrote:
| dosdude1 is awesome. He replaced the BGA CPU in my iMac G4 with a
| 1.7 GHz MC7448 (https://mattst88.com/computers/imacg4/) and made
| a video about the process:
|
| 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=EMCz0VsEbqc
| marktangotango wrote:
| I'm hoping he makes a video detailing the pcb design and
| layout. Very impressive project using Kicad!
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yeah he's one of the big online names in classic Mac stuff.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Edit: edited out "Dosdude" which is the name of the author, not
| the project.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-23 23:00 UTC)