Old notebook, trouble with SSD [resolved]

I've got this old Acer Aspire 5670 notebook (yeah I said old) and I wanted to milk a little more mileage off it. I don't use it much, but it's nice to have one around when you need one. So I upraded some parts and loaded it up with Win7. Actually worked out pretty cheap, Sandisk SSD Plus for $40, T7600 Core 2 duo for $20 and 4GB of memory for $30. It's surprisingly peppy now, at least enough to serve my needs until I get around to buying a new machine.

The one issue I'm having is the BIOS does not see the SSD on boot every now and then. It ends up showing "operating system not found" on the screen. A subsequent boot usually picks up the drive and gets it going. The BIOS in this thing is really sparse. Not much at all in terms of options. I've tried changing the few settings that are available and nothing makes a difference. Any way to do something about this? Thinking maybe there's a BIOS hack out there or something.

 

Thanks for the replies, much appreciated.

Defective drive was my first thought as well. I actually run my desktop computer (which is what I use mainly) with the same drives plus spares so I tried another drive. No difference.

From researching on the net I was aware that old notebook requires a BIOS update to support the T7600. It's the most powerful CPU that notebook's 945M chipset supports. Latest version Acer provides is 3229 and that's what I'm running.

Looking up the specs on Intel (they actually still list info for all their legacy products) the original T2300 CPU is 31W and the T7600 is 34W. It does seem to run a bit hotter, but also Win7 seems to do a better job of throttling the CPU so I'm not seeing crazy temps.

Unfortunately this old notebook is before the time of AHCI as the standard disk interface and does not support it. Best it can do is legacy Sata 1.5Gb.

At this point I think I'll have to try another brand of disk and see if it works better, thinking PNY. Not a loss since I can use that Sandisk drive for my desktop. I keep a number of drives with a removable drive bay so I can boot different OS installs. Actually been doing that since the days of IDE and ribbon cables. The one I'm using now I really like, it's the Syba MRDU25S (can't post links yet, post count too low).

 

That's something that's not really clear based on what I've read. I've seen statements that trim is an OS thing and works regardless of the interface mode. I've checked it with the command "fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify". It does return an enabled indication. Also Sandisk provides a utility to check and update hard disk firmware. It also checks performance and indicates if trim is functioning properly. So I'm not really convinced that trim is non-functional in legacy SATA mode. If I notice things are slowing down with the disk I can take action on it. The notebook doesn't get used a lot so it may not make a big difference.

I was hoping I might be able to update hard disk firmware to eliminate the problem, but all my disks are at the latest revision. In any case if the PNY disks use a different controller that might make a difference. I figured they all use their own proprietary firmware and things can operate somewhat different internally from one brand to the next.

 

I'll post here after I try another disk. Though I'm doing other stuff now so don't know when I'll get around to ordering another one, not a high priority since I don't use the machine all that often.

 

I installed a PNY 120GB SSD, model is CS1311 which is an inexpensive one. That seems to have resolved the issue. For whatever reason the SanDisk SSD doesn't play nice with the BIOS on that old notebook computer.