Hands on: Get better performance from an old PC

Practical solutions to overcome the limitations of using an old PC

In our feature about how to upgrade a hard disk we discuss the issues involved in fitting a new large hard disk to an older system.

Problems include the inability to recognise capacities larger than 137GB, and more obviously, the absence of Serial ATA (Sata) ports to connect the latest drives.

A number of solutions exist to solve these problems, but before spending any money you should check the support section of your motherboard manufacturer’s website to discover the largest disk your system will support, and whether any Bios updates will improve your situation.

If your machine’s more than a few years old, it’s likely neither your Bios nor operating system will natively support disks larger than 137GB.

In this instance, you’ll need third-party help from an internal disk controller card or an external disk enclosure. Both will allow all but the oldest systems to exploit new, large disks.

To put these options to the test I looked into upgrading the disk in a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 system with 512MB of Ram.

This may not seem very old, but already the motherboard was imposing restrictions on the kind of disks I could fit.

I was unable to confirm whether the latest Bios would support disks greater than 137GB, but either way, the connectivity was limited to parallel ATA disks, preventing me from trying a new Sata model.

I decided to try an internal disk controller card but, beyond compatibility, the question was whether the old system would compromise the performance of the new disk.

To find out, I got hold of Seagate’s 7200.9 500GB Sata disk. At the time of writing, this represented the state of the art in 3.5in hard disks, with a massive capacity and support for the latest 3Gbits/sec and Native Command Queuing (NCQ) Sata standards.

To support this disk in my older system, I fitted a Promise SATA300 TX2 Plus PCI controller card costing around £45. To compare performance against a current system, I also tried the disk with the onboard Sata controller on an Aopen i915GMm-HFS motherboard fitted with a 2.13GHz Pentium M Model 770 and 1GB of Crucial DDR2 memory.

To measure the performance on each system, I ran HD-Tach, which runs under Windows 2000 or XP and measures sequential read, random access and interface burst speeds.

To measure write performance, the drive must be blank and connected as a secondary disk to an existing boot drive.

Connected to the onboard controller of the Aopen Pentium M system, the Seagate 500GB disk scored 50.1 and 45.1Mbytes/sec for average read and write speeds respectively, while peaking at 130.5 Mbytes/sec for burst speed.

Out of curiosity, I tried the Promise controller card in the Aopen system, upon which the Seagate disk scored exactly the same for average read and write speeds, although interestingly suffered from a reduced peak burst speed of 102Mbytes/sec.

I then fitted the Promise card into my older system, connected the Seagate drive and re-ran the tests.

HD-Tach measured the average read and write speeds again as exactly the same 50.1 and 45.1Mbytes/sec respectively, while the peak speed was 109.9Mbytes/sec.
I also tried the Seagate disk inside an ST-M10 enclosure from the Direct USB Store. This enclosure uniquely supports Sata hard disks and employs an external Sata connector; if your system doesn’t have an ‘Esata’ port, the enclosure can be bought with a suitable PCI card.

Once again the HD-Tach benchmarks measured exactly the same average read and write times, although with a reduced burst speed of 96.4Mbytes/sec.

On the cards

Sometimes when comparing different configurations, you’re disappointed when the results aren’t measurably different, but in this case it was quite reassuring.

I was concerned the older system might compromise the performance of the new disk but, as the results showed, it made no difference.

Both the Promise card and the external disk enclosure allowed the new Seagate drive to perform no differently on an older system as it had on a new one, while eliminating concerns over compatibility and support.

I later configured a similar Sata disk as the new boot drive on my old PC, giving the full performance and capacity to my C: volume.

As mentioned in the Hardware column, to set up a disk connected to a third-party card as a boot volume you still need the card’s drivers on a floppy disk for the initial Windows installation.

Hopefully this will improve with a future version of Windows.

In conclusion, if there’s no update for your Bios to support big disks, you should certainly consider fitting a third-party controller card.

So long as the card comes with drivers that support your operating system, you should be enjoying larger capacities with relative ease.