SSD, XP64 & P45 - am I wasting my time?

Soldato
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I have a 90GB Vertex 2E spare after upgrading my SB rig to a Crucial M4 so I thought I might use it to give my old Q9450 rig a boost. However, given that XP doesn't support TRIM, is this worth persuing? If so, how should I set the drive up or is there a way to fudge TRIM support in XP?
 
I believe theres a manual utility on the OCZ website you can run to do garbage collection under XP and Vista. Works nice and quick in IDE mode, in AHCI it works slow, in RAID it doesnt work.. so maybe you need to switch a setting in the bios once a month to do the garbage collection and then reboot.

And you can manually create the partition you want to install WinXP into with the DiskPart utility on another Vista/Win7 machine, setting the alignment up if thats important to you. Just dont let the install process create a partition and install into the one you made.
 
Unless you plan to sell drive, you might as well use it. Just don't use XP disk to make partition as mentioned.

I'm using a SSD with a P45 Core2Duo system and Vista and it works fine for me (Intel model using Toolbox to do TRIM on demand).

Wouldn't say the boot time is massively improved, but most of that is passing through BIOS screen then ACHI screen. The readiness/responsiveness once Sidebar has loaded is great, and silence is nice (mechanical drive used to occasionally reverberate though aluminium case).

Besides using any OCZ tools you could use Log Off option of Windows Start menu for drive firmware to perform its own garbage collection.
 
In my honest opinion, I probably wouldnt bother with an ssd with out Windows 7.

Windows 7 is optimized for ssd, where as Vista and XP your have to use hacks etc to get the most out of them.

I guess it depends how important you need the speed.
 
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