pheasant16 wrote:
Have an old box using XP with 5 hard drives full of data that needs
updating due to financial website issues and XP.
Would it be possible to add Win 7 or 10 on an SSD in an PCIE slot to
get a newer operating system and retain most of the integrity of the
current box?
The current MB is probably about 10 years old, MSI 980-G65.
Haven't messed with a build since this one, but thought if possible to
do the above, then I could remove all HD connectors except the SSD get
it booted and then plug all the drives in and let it reassign new
letters to the drives. Then add the programs back to the SSD and away
we go.
If that is possible would I need to tell the bios not to find the old HD
with XP or once it boots into a newer one, would that not be a concern
Thanks for your thoughts.
Mark
It's a nice chipset, could be this one. Notice the Southbridge (MCP)
connects to the CPU first, and the PCI Express switch is at
the bottom. What doesn't make sense to me, is I thought the
Nforce200 had four x8 interfaces (32 lanes), yet your
motherboard appears to have 40 lanes. It must mean
the second video card slot cheats somehow. Maybe it's only
wired x8. The Nforce200, I thought it takes PCIe on the
input side, and as long as those PCIe are overclocked,
you get a bit more bandwidth in aggregate, from the slots
themselves.
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/screen...k-Diagramm.jpg
The manual has the details. It does cheat a little bit, and
it looks like the Nforce200 supports bifurcation, has
"fake 32 lanes bandwidth" and 40 lane wiring.
3 PCI Express Gen2 x16 slots
(PCI_E2, PCI_E4, PCI_E5) x16/ x16/ x0 or x16/ x8/ x8 ===
2 PCI Express x1 slots
2 PCI slots, support 3.3V/ 5V PCI bus Interface
You do have some PCIe slots, so expansion for I/O is
still possible if you needed it. The slots are hefty
enough, even a $1000 RAID card could be used.
x16 PCIe video card here Rev.2 wired x16
x1 PCIe (slot may be covered by video card) Rev.1.1
x16 PCIe Rev.2 wired x16/x8
PCI (suitable for sound card)
x16 PCIe Rev.2 wired x8
PCI (suitable for sound card)
That means there are at least two PCIe slots
for I/O card experiments.
AM3 (Phenom II)
DDR3 memory, four slots, 16GB max
Win7 and Win10 could run in 1GB to 3GB of RAM,
Win10 will run in as little as 256MB of memory
in a virtual machine, and you can still open
Notepad in 256MB of memory.
But the OSes start to be happy at maybe 2GB of RAM.
Any more RAM than that, is for your application size.
Opening the Yahoo News page takes 1GB of RAM (on a bad day).
*******
Your storage ports are SATA II. 300MB/sec max.
Still perfectly usable with modern SSDs.
If you want to get slightly more than 300MB/sec,
you'd want a SATA III card.
*******
Let's draw a cheap expansion card diagram.
PCI Express x1 lane -------- SATA chip -- SATA III
-- SATA III
PCI Express Rev1.1 250MB/sec 600MB/sec per port
Rev2 500MB/sec 600MB/sec per port
Rev3 985MB/sec 600MB/sec per port
While the card has two ports, there's only enough
bandwidth for one storage drive, if you want to
"win some benchmarks". In normal usage patterns with
two SSDs connected, you won't notice the limitation.
Since PCIe is full duplex, you can copy files from
SSD1 to SSD2 at *full rate*. That's because SSD1
is using the TX bandwidth, and SSD2 is using the RX
bandwidth. It's only benchmarking contests, where you
sweat the details like this.
If we take this hypothetical SATA card and plug it
into your x1 rev1.1 slot (the little slot next to
your video card), "you lose". The SATA port
actual operating speed, is about as good as your
Southbridge ports.
If we install the SATA expansion card in one of
your video card slots (it'll fit, but the heel clip
won't hold down the tail of the card), the bandwidth
is "getting better, but isn't great".
There was an early Marvell SATA chip, that only
did 300MB/sec, even when you fed it a fine dinner
and all.
Other chips work better than that.
What would really be a win, is if we could spot a
SATA chip with two lanes on the bus side.
PCI Express x2 lane -------- SATA chip -- SATA III
^ -- SATA III
|
500MB/sec 600MB/sec per port
1000MB/sec 600MB/sec per port
1970MB/sec 600MB/sec per port
Now, our Rev.2 slot allows winning some benching contests
on the older motherboard. Can we find a chip like that ?
The edge card of the SATA board, ends up with a x4 shaped
edge, with x2 lanes wired up. And then it *only* fits in
a big slot, and no longer fits in the x1 slot.
ASM1062
http://www.asmedia.com.tw/eng/e_show...cate_index=166
two lane of PCI Express Rev.2.0
2 ports SATA III
Now, the closest I could get, is this one. But it has the
connectors on the faceplate as ESATA, and that's definitely
not what the doctor ordered. We can't buy this one, but
at least we can admire the layout of the adapter board.
https://www.amazon.com/Ableconn-PEX-.../dp/B07595M2MK
You can see in the detail photo, the edge-card is actually x2 long.
Normally, you would expect a larger x4 edge card connector, but the
cheap *******s didn't want to gold-plate a whole x4 connector,
so they shaved it down to x2. It's still the same selection problem
though, because an x2 or x4 connector, only fit in an x4, x8, or
x16 slot. The x2 won't fit in an x1 slot. (There are motherboard
connectors with an "open end" on them, that allow plugging larger
cards into smaller slots, but they're not all that common of
a connector design. Usually the connector is a bright yellow,
if the end is open on it.)
Summary:
1) Your Southbridge ports are already SATA II and good enough
for a cheap SSD. The prices of SSDs are plunging a bit,
as several fabs bring 64-layer VNAND into production.
2) If you wanted to "beef up" your machine, for bragging rights,
you do have excess video slots for the purposes of adding
I/O cards. Even though your slots are Rev.2 lanes, you can
still find I/O cards with x2 lane interfaces, and two lanes
of Rev.2 there is 2x500MB/sec or 1GB/sec. This should suffice
to see the full read bandwidth of that Samsung Pro SSD you bought.
But for most trashy SSDs, (1) is enough for them, as you're
not buying that SSD to brag about it. Someone with an NVMe
drive at 2.5GB/sec is doing the bragging.
You can't boot your machine with an NVMe. You can buy PCIe to
NVMe adapter boards. In some cases (a Canadian company offers
this), they place a PCIe switch on the card, plus multiple
NVMe slots for $100. And because there is a switch chip, it
can convert Rev.2 lanes to Rev.3 lanes and get full bandwidth
from an NVMe. But without boot support, you'd still need
some other drive with a System Reserved or similar. It's
not worth the hair loss to research this... Just stick with
a cheap SSD and stay within your budget, whatever it is.
A 128GB SSD will have plenty of room for an OS. The OS install
is 10GB to start. You might have a hibernation file on there,
which could increase the footprint. If you install a lot
of games and software, it might consume the whole SSD.
For non-gamer applications, even a Visual Studio setup
would likely only use half the SSD.
Keep your movie collection on the rotating hard drive.
Paul