Necroposting my own thread....
Someone was asking about this old scope so I dug up this thread and thought, it's been five years now that the SSD has been running in both the 64Xi and the 8500A. Time for an update.
I don't use the 8500A often but the 64Xi continues to be my primary scope and sees a fair amount of use. I have not had a single problem with the two drives.
I recently went to use the 8500A and it came up with some musical song and an error about how it had overheated the last time it was used. I was concerned that maybe the SSD was the problem but it was the battery for the NVRAM was all. Installed a new battery, reset the BIOS and it was back in business.
I picked up an old VNA from around this same era and ended up buying a couple more of the Transcend drives for it as well. That PC is running Windows 2000, compared with XP in the two LeCroys. It's been in service for a few months now and is seeing a fair amount of use as well with no problems. I wonder if these drives are starting to become harder to find so I bought a few of them. They were shipped direct from the factory.
On the 8500A, I had installed a Gb Ethernet card which also seemed to raise some questions if it was going to cause problems. After five years, again it seems to be fine.
Had replaced the drive on the 8500A with an SSD. It's been working very well. I had bought two different ones to try. One SATA one PATA. The SATA with adapter went in the 8500A, the PATA is going into this system. Different brand, we will see.
Just be careful with SSDs in that scope, as they tend to suffer from file system corruption (I tried several ones, including the Transcend PATA SSD on your picture), and all suffered from the same problem.
The reason seems to be that the SSDs only really support UDMA modes, which for PATA requires a 80 conductor cable to work reliably. The scope however uses a 44pin cable (there are no 84 conductor cables, at least I'm not aware of them) which is not really suited for UDMA66 or faster modes. Another forum user (Tunersandwich) who has the same scope made the same experience, he also tried a SSHD but that was a no-go either.
In the end I went back to spinning rust, i.e. a modern fast SATA laptop drive connected through a cheap SATA-PATA bridge. Works fine and absolutely reliable.
$7350 for the Rigol DS6064 or $9660 for the DS6104. I assume this is the market LeCroy is going after.
Not really. The WaveRunner Series starts quite a bit above that.
The WaveSurfer 3000 is the one that competes with the Rigol DS6000 scopes, although no-one really buys them anyways due to their poor value for money.