Hands on: Get better performance from an old PC

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.