Ide ssd?

don't think those exist... for the simple fact the IDE bus would have too little bandwidth to make any performance gains happen.

correct me if I'm wrong though...

They exist, but I can only find them under Transcend, and they're VERY expensive compared to SATA counterparts.

Only thing I can think of is a SATA-IDE converter. But you'll be heavily limited since I doubt the IDE interface can keep up with a SSD.

Honestly its not worth it. If you have a extra PCI-E slot for some reason you could grab a add-on Sata card and use that.

You could buy a PCI->Sata Card and then hook an SSD up to that....

Thanks for the info OCNers.

@ AMD+Nvidia: I don't think it's really worth it to get a SSD for that Top...

your call though

They do make PCMCIA or Expressbus sataII controller cards as well.

The first SSDs were actually on IDE...

However, you need 44-pin IDE and not the desktop 40-pin IDE...

The IDE interface is plenty fast enough to see an improvement - it can hit 133MB/s, which is fairly close to the SATA I max speed.

The boost from an SSD does not really come from the high transfer rates - it comes from the near-zero access time. IDE manages this just as well as SATA does - especially on systems with native IDE support (unlike most new mobos that only have IDE through a SATA-IDE interface anyway).

The problem is that no-one makes current-gen SSDs with IDE interfaces - because the market for people wanting to spend $200+ on old laptops is pretty small, and all new laptops run SATA drives. The older drives suffer from the stuttering problems and are REALLY expensive when compared to current-gen SATA drives. So really you are SOL. Your best option will likely be a WD Scorpio Black or similar...

The $76.48 IDE SSD:

Compact Flash Adapter
and
16gb Compact Flash card

The flash card is rated "up to 46MB/s Read" which is about the same as an IDE laptop hard disk and about as fast as IDE will go, the write speed is worse than a hard disk, and it is tiny in capacity.

But it has no moving parts, almost no latency, and uses less power.

BTW... I believe I have a both 44-pin and 40-pin IDE adapter... let me know if you want to buy.

yeah as someone said before, IDE and Compact flash have identical connections electrically

i think going with CF card is the closest you will get to SSD

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820208529

here is the best CF card i could find... but for that price you should just get a new laptop

If you go the CF route make sure you get one that supports UDMA - normally they are pretty expensive, but the performance is much better.

Remember you lose wear levelling on CF cards though (at least all the ones I have ever seen), so you may need to take steps to control writes to the disk or be prepared to have to replace the drive every few years or so...