Previously I wrote about how the onward march of technology has slowed down, but the ‘stigma’ that surrounds using older hardware has not been reduced to correlate appropriately. Despite slowing down, technology has certainly improved, particularly as we look back further. This can make for very unique challenges when it comes to maintenance for older systems.

In particular, the Thinkpad T41 that I wrote about in the above previous post has a failing Hard Disk, which I believe I also mentioned. This presents itself as a unique challenge, as it is a Laptop EIDE drive. These are available on sites like Amazon and eBay, but this gives the choice of rather pricey (a few dollars a GB) for a new drive, or used and thus of unknown lifespan (eBay). I ended up purchasing a cheap 40GB drive off eBay. However, I discovered that was not my only option, As it turns out that products have been released that almost entirely address this issue.

I speak of CompactFlash adapters. These are adapters which connect to a Laptop 44-pin EIDE interface, and allow you to plug a CompactFlash card into the other side. The device it is plugged into basically just sees a standard HDD. This is an interesting approach because it is in some sense an SSD for older systems, perhaps without quite the speed benefit of an SSD, though still with the advantage of Solid State.

Since I had already purchased a cheap 40GB drive off eBay, I decided to grab an adapter and a CompactFlash card as well for Benchmark purposes. My expectation was that the CompactFlash card would run much faster.

The first step was what to use to compare. CrystalDiskMark was about as good an option as any, so I went with that. First I tested the 40GB drive I received, Then I tested the CompactFlash Adapter. The HDD is a Toshiba MK4036GAX. The Adapter is a “Syba Connectivity 2.5 Inch IDE 44-pin to Dual Compact-Flash Adapter SD-ADA5006” and the Card I’m using with it is a 32GB Lexar Professional 800x 32GB.

Looking at the table, we see that, unlike modern SSDs, the use of a CompactFlash drive has some trade-offs. They get much faster performance for typical read operations such as sequential reads and random reads, but they falter particularly for random write operations. Or, rather, this particular CF adapter and card had problems with that arrangement.

Another interesting issue I encountered was that neither Windows nor Linux are able to establish a pagefile/swap partition on the compact Flash card. This is a bit of a problem, though with few exceptions most programs I use on this laptop would tend to not tax the 2GB of total memory available. That said, a bigger issue that may or may not be related seemed to be that Windows XP cannot seem to install programs that use Windows Installer databases- instead they will endlessly prompt for a Disc- even when they don’t use a Disc or if the Disc being installed from is in the drive. I wasn’t able to discover the cause of this problem after investigating it, though I had no issues installing when using the standard HDD.

For now, I’ve got the system back on it’s “normal” HDD drive which as I noted in the linked post works just fine- so in that sense, my “upgrade” attempt has failed, which is unfortunate. The system runs well, for what can be expected of it; As mentioned it is quite snappy, considering it being considered “ancient” by many, it still works respectably for reading most Web content as well as writing blog posts, so the argument that it is out-of-date is hard to properly substantiate. I would certainly find it lacking, mind you, for replacing my everyday tasks, or doing things like watching youtube videos, but despite it’s age I’ve found it fits well in a niche of usefulness that keeps it from being completely obsolete, at least for me.

When it comes to computers, in general, I think you can make use of systems from any era. You can still use older systems largely the same for the same tasks they were originally designed for, the main difference is that more recent systems add additional capabilities; for example, you won’t be watching youtube on a Pentium 133 PC. But you wouldn’t be watching youtube on such a system when it was top-of-the-line, either. I find there is something appealing about the simplicity of older systems, while at the same time the limitations of those older systems (where present) can make for an interesting challenge to overcome, and finding the right balance between the software and hardware can be more nuanced than “throw the latest available version on”.

Another consideration is something like security. For example, you might make use of an older IBM PC that uses Floppy diskettes to boot as a central password manager, or to store other sensitive information. (With copies of course). This allows the old system to be used beyond just fiddling about, and fulfill a useful function. However it would still be far less convenience then, say, Keypass or Lastpass or software of that nature. On the other hand, nobody is going to hack into your non-Internet-Connected PC without physical access.