Hands on: Get better performance from 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.