For fun I’m taking an old computer and trying to make it run as best as possible (which won’t be that great.)
It runs pretty slow for two main reasons.
The CPU is about maxed out for speed. It’s a single core 1GHZ.
The RAM is maxed out at 512MB.
Slow video card, which I’m going to replace.
So, one thing I can do is speed up the hard drive speed. Right now the built-in controller is an EIDE UDMA 66/100.
I did a benchmark of my hard drive speeds, here’s what I got.
Drive C:
Sequential Writing 22.16MB/s - Sequential Reed 25.94MB/s
Buffered Writing 61.71MB/s - Buffered Reading 76.92MB/s
Random Reading 19MB/s
Drive D:
Sequential Writing 27.56MB/s - Sequential Reed 33.03MB/s
Buffered Writing 53.36MB/s - Buffered Reading 56.04MB/s
Random Reading 29MB/s
And now the question. If I get a PCI card with SATA ports and got a SATA drive, how much faster would my drive speeds be? And would I notice much of a difference overall?
Your hard drive performance could be massively improved with a new drive (those numbers are terrible), but… for what purpose? Windows will load faster, programs will open faster, but it’s never going to be a speedster with that old stuff. I would suggest that unless you’re running an extremely light system with almost nothing running increased ram would give you more performance than a bigger hard drive, but getting ram that old actually becomes quite expensive because it’s rare.
Rather than putting any money in that system I’d recommend just saving up like $350-400 for a cheap prebuilt that’ll crush that thing in performance.
A 1Ghz single core? What is that thing, from 2001?
That computer is too old to do anything with other than repurpose as a server of some sort. Do what I did, get Windows Home Server and stuff it with 2 or 3 terabytes of hard drives. Hold all of your media on it and backup your other computers to it.
As was already mentioned, your drive speeds could be improved, but I think the overall system performance is going to be fairly minimal. Increasing the data rate of the drive itself and increasing the bus speed help, but they don’t increase the rate at which data goes through the CPU and the main processor bus.
Disk drive performance is a lot of hooey these days anyway. In the old days, drive performance could be relatively easily characterized by how quickly the drive could move the head (track to track seek time) and how quickly it could read the data from the sector once it had the drive head positioned properly. The data caches in modern disk drives make those numbers completely meaningless, because your benchmark program will often end up reading cached data. Since the drive doesn’t need to physically access the disk, these data accesses are extremely fast. In the real world, though, those sorts of access times can’t be sustained forever. Sooner or later the disk runs out of cache or the predictive algorithm fails and the drive will need to physically access the disk platters, which is significantly slower.
Unfortunately, we haven’t come up with a good standard way of characterizing the performance of a modern caching disk drive, so any numbers you see are often nearly meaningless for real world performance.
This particular computer* is not going to be used for much, and like I said, it’s just a hobby. I’m only doing this because I find it interesting (yeah, I’m boring, I know).
So from everything I’ve read SATA drives will be a big improvement. Cool.
Oh, and as a matter of fact, this computer is from about 2001.
My main computer has a dual core processor, 6GB RAM, and is running Windows 7 64 bit, so it’s not like I don’t have a good computer.
The best thing you can do is get an older operating system on it. I ran a computer with similar specs as a sort of net-desktop by putting first Puppy Linux, then Windows 2000 on it. YouTube and Megavideo (and most other video sites) even worked well. Facebook games were slower, but still playable, particularly on Windows 2000’s Internet Explorer 6. (I used Firefox 5 for everything else.)
Your RAM is too small to benefit much from a faster hard drive. All that data has to go someplace and you don’t have enough RAM for a decent operating system, let alone work space. You are paging in and out of the hard drive just to do simple tasks.
When you say the RAM is “maxed out,” do you mean that no more can be added? Can the chips be replaced with higher values? If not, I don’t think you have much hope towards improving the performance unless you just want to run DOS or Win98.
