15 years ago, I changed the build-in 1.8inch 40pin ZIF PATA Hard-drive of the OQO model 02 to a Sandisk Extreme IV CF card, it was sure something new at the time, and time flies to 2023, flash storage sure has greatly improved (so is everything, other than human beings)

This time, I opt to go for a 40pin ZIF converter to mSATA SSD, to be precise, a 128GB Samsung PM871 mSATA SSD.

By specs, it sure is a waste for such mSATA SSD to be use with PATA in the OQO 02 (400MB/s read for the SSD limited by the 133MB/s over PATA) , but I choose this path as ZIF SSD are getting hard to come across, and I still believe a SSD controller would do better wear compare to a CF, most importantly, I obtain the SSDs by lot at US$12each (I recall seeing the invoice of that Sandisk Extreme IV 8GB CF some years ago when I clean the invoice pile up, it was around US$175 back in 2008)

Now the OQO02 is working well even with Windows 7 SP1 installed.

Side note, due to how the BIOS on the OQO02 was designed (at the time installing OS from USB was still something new), it is not possible to install Windows 7 by USB Thumb drive, it will hang and fail to install, DVD has to be burnt and install directly from a USB DVD ROM.

Links
My own post on CF over ZIF on a OQO02 back in 2008 https://theopoon.rinnovative.com/2008/02/27/oqo-model-02cf/
Samsung PM871 mSATA 128GB benchmark
https://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/hdd.php?hdd=SAMSUNG%20SSD%20PM871%20mSATA%20128GB&id=12703

I was chatting with mate C over a dinner meet up mentioning I am recently back to retro UMPC for fun, he asked did I used to have a OQO? that trigger me to do some dig on the thrift market, and to my surprise, I ran into some new old stock someone left in a warehouse somewhere for all these years.

So, hell yes, let’s go back in the memory lane, and let’s have some fun with this piece of history again, after these 16 years!