I have an old Think-pad Laptop, which has a 50GB Pata HDD. I was wondering the best way to replace it with an 200GB SSD, without replacing the optical drive with a Pata to Sata Convertor.
I have found online to use a Compact Flash card with a converter, however to get a good sized flash card your looking at over £100.
I was wondering if M-Sata is better, so get a converter for and a M-Sata SSD.
If anyone has any better ideas that would me most appreciated.
I wouldn’t use CompactFlash or SDXC for a OS as you’ll wear down the card very quickly and some brands of cards have problems with certain CF/SDHC/XC to PATA adapters. In the early days it was a poor-mans SSD option of running a “thin” boot OS if you wanted to free up actual SATA ports and use the PATA port for a boot drive.
PATA to mSATA adapters are common for older notebooks and ITX/SFF desktops(2.5" bays), you’ll have to balance out the price and SSD durability(write life) as older OSes don’t support TRIM. If you don’t want to waste money on a pricey Samsung 850/860 mSATA, there are other companies which have similar read/write speeds or budget versions.
Thanks, ill have a look around to see if one is going cheap.
Wouldn’t something like this work for you?
They’re fairly cheap and supposedly very reliable as well from what i’ve heard from the users.
Just search for “pata ssd” (or “ide ssd”) on whatever online seller you prefer.
I like the idea for the Pata SSD, however they are a bit expensive for what you get.
The cheapest i found is for £36.87 for a 32GB PATA SSD,
The Cheapest M-Sata SSD is £26.74 for 120GB + £7 for the Adapter.
That’s probably the best way to go but be weary of those cheap adapters.
I did the mSATA + adapter swap a couple of years ago on a colleague’s ancient XP laptop whose 15GB PATA drive had died.
Of course you’re not going to get the SSD’s full speed, but you still get the immediate response of an SSD.
Sadly the laptop itself died shortly afterwards, so no idea how that setup would have fared in the long run.
Surely for the cost of screwing around with adapters you could replace the entire machine with something still old but supporting SATA (and stuff like DDR3, etc.)?
Pretty sure laptops switched to SATA about 10+ years ago, so there should be plenty of ex-business stuff floating around cheap that was replaced years ago…
Unless you are particularly attached to that old thinkpad?
I support this idea. Even my old HP6710b has sata but not ddr3. 
I bought it as used, 7 years ago at the auction for $110. I only put a new battery and SSD into it and it’s still “usable” in 2019. So packing $$$ into something that does not even have sata is art for art. There is no other sense in this.