Chosen Solution
I am looking to upgrade my HP nc6000 to a machine that’s quite a bit newer and will have more video memory, as the nc6000 only has 32MB and I didn’t get the 64MB base board with mine. It works and I’m still going to keep it around, but I want something just a bit newer for some of the older games I want to run but can’t due to the limited VRAM situation. That said, a lot of the old machines that are modern yet cheap if you’re willing to put some work in (think Core 2 ThinkPad and Latitude E series) to get it going again are going to be old enough to either be limited to SATA I/II or capped due to older option ROMs, as is the case with systems like the T61. Since I am probably going to get a no HD machine that works at a discount since SATA drives are actually easy to get, I need an SSD with proper legacy SATA support. I know I can probably get a hard drive but a lot of the legacy models which are backwards compatible are NOS and will likely be hard to find given enough time. I would like to put a small 128/256GB SSD in to get around these stock problems. One option I know will work is I can pull the Crucial M500 out of my T420, get another SSD for it (250 instead of 240) and clone it. I know this drive is old enough to have legacy SATA speed support, but it’s not a drop in solution since I need to take active steps to preserve the setup and data on the Crucial SSD. The T420 is SATA III compatible, so even if I get one of those legacy free/premium SATA II/III drives I shouldn’t have an issue.
You need to review the given drives spec sheet to see what it supports. If it does not state SATA I (1.5 Gb/s) or SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) support it won’t work reliably. Many SATA drives are now fixed SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) as the market of older SATA I (1.5 Gb/s) or SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) fixed speed drives have disappeared off of the market (new). Today only unboxed and used drives is about all thats available. Auto sense drives which support multiple SATA I/O speeds are about all that’s left as new. As an example Samsung 860 EVO note the Interface line lists all three SATA I/O speeds.
This may help you. Recently I upgraded an old DELL Inspiron 6000 to an SSD mSATA drive (Kingston 120G SSDNOW UV500) and it worked amazingly, for its age, with Windows 10. Of course I had to use an mSATA to IDE adapter but you might use an mSATA to 2.5” SATA adapter which are quite cheap and easily found. Just an idea. Let us know how it goes?
