Replacing a hard drive in an old computer with solid-state storage can greatly improve performance. Here is a list of options for replacing a drive, including what each one is best for.
Any fast SSD you install into an IDE-based system will not reach its peak performance potential due to the limits of the slow IDE bus. While performace will be better than with a hard drive, do not expect the same gains you would expect in a SATA-based system.Using one of these adapters will allow you to use a CompactFlash card as your SSD. The benefit is that adapters are very cheap, as CompactFlash uses what is essentially just a shrunken IDE connector.
There are a few important things to mention when doing this. First, these adapters are really only suitable for 1990s machines. CF cards were never designed as primary OS drives, and as such, newer Operating Systems like Mac OS X and Windows NT can stress the cards pretty hard, and even wear it out faster. They are also slower than any options.
Their best use case is in computers that will only be running Windows 9x or classic Mac OS. Larger capacity CF cards can get expensive, making systems that only need a few GBs the best systems to use them in. They can also work better in systems with more primitive IDE controllers that are picky on which drives they accept.
One important thing to note: Many old computers will only recognize CF cards that appear as "fixed" (non-removeable) media. It can be rather difficult to find data on what cards can be made to appear as fixed media, but the best bet seems to be to find cards that are marked as "industrial".Similar to the CF adapter, this one has the same idea but with SD or MicroSD cards instead. This adds the benefit of faster performance, and higher capacity SD/microSD cards are also less expensive than comparable CF cards. Additional hardware is required to convert SD cards to the IDE interface as compared to CF, which initially made these adapters pricier than their CF counterparts. In recent years however, prices have become cost-competitive with CF adapters.
As with CF, people have reported good luck with getting them working with finicky IDE buses. They also have the benefit of wearing out slower than a CF card, although they still aren't the fastest under Windows NT and Mac OS X. They are cheap though!
These adapters tend to offer the best overall performance, and will likely max out the slow IDE bus on any computer they're installed in. Being designed for running an OS, they will also have faster performance under Windows NT and OS X as compared to SD or CF adapters.
One downside of these is that they tend to have issues being recognized by primitive and picky IDE controllers, like those used in early IDE PowerBooks for example.
These adapters are also sold pre-assembled with an SSD already installed as "IDE SSDs", although they seem to be more expensive than if you bought the adapter and SSD seperately.
Home < Macintosh Portal < Upgrades Hub < IDE SSD Options