I had one of those IDE-to-SATA converters lying around in my drawer for some reason. I used it to throw a modern 500G SSD into my old P4:

40-Pin PATA to 2.5" SATA HDD/SSD/ODD Converter mounted on SATA SSD

I transferred my Debian install from the period 160G HDD onto the SSD drive and now it’s nice and quiet, and quite a bit speedier than the original IDE HDD.

But I only use it with Linux because Windows XP doesn’t have TRIM support and will kill the SSD in short order if I run it. Linux on the other hand… no problem, it’s safe:

~$ lsblk --discard
NAME   DISC-ALN DISC-GRAN DISC-MAX DISC-ZERO
fd0           0        0B       0B         0
fd1           0        0B       0B         0
sda           0      512B       2G         0
├─sda1        0      512B       2G         0
├─sda2        0      512B       2G         0
└─sda3        0      512B       2G         0
sr0           0        0B       0B         0
sr1           0        0B       0B         0

(Non-zero DISC-GRAN and DISC-MAX values indicates TRIM support)

Another proof that Linux is just plain better 😉

The machine has been rocking this disk all day long without any problem. I recommend this little doodad.