SSD for old PC

E

echter

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Joined
Feb 10, 2016
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I'm looking for an SSD for a PC that's maxed out with 8gb of RAM. It's constantly running out of memory, and currently I've got the main Photoshop scratch disk assigned to RAM, as well as the Win 7 pagefile and the Firefox disk cache. The idea is to shift the pagefile and and scratch disk over to the SSD which will free up about 1.7 gb of RAM. It won't be used for the OS.

So which SSD? The board only supports SATA 1, so do the read/write speeds still matter? I like the reviews of Samsung 850 EVO 120gb, but for around $40 you can get something like an ADATA SP550 or Sandisk SSDplus, but I worry that these will be less reliable/too slow. If speed is similar, I'd pay more for more longevity. No need for high capacity, so 120gb is fine if it's cheaper.
 
Since it is SATA 1, just get the cheapest as no matter what you get, you will be capped at the SATA 1 speeds. SATA RW speeds are capped at about 140 MBps each.
 
Sorry for making you repeat yourself but are you sure it's just SATA I (1.5 Gbps?)
Because that is incredibly old. VIA 8237 old. The SATA sockets didn't even have the outer ridge for the cable to snap into place back then. Care to share the motherboard model?
Everything after like 2007 was SATA II (3 Gbps).
Having said that, the oldest machine I had put a SSD in is a laptop with Intel GL40 (Cantiga-GL) + ICH9M. Bought in 2007 or 2008. Has XP on it but works with AHCI enabled. I don't really care about it becoming worn out. So far so good. It was a kingston something something.
SATA I becomes saturated at just around 120 MB/s, but you will still benefit a lot from the speedy access times. I am not sure if TRIM will work.
 
Hmm. Maybe I'm wrong. It's a Gigabyte P35-DS3L I thought it was SATA1 but their site does say 3gb/s.
Even if I'm not going to see much of a speed difference, I'd like to get something less prone to failure.
 
Yes, it's SATA II. So, turn on AHCI, make sure the command
fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify
returns 0
and you're all set I guess.
SATA II goes to about 240MB/s IIRC. But, man, the access times are what's in the secret sauce.
Oh and you will notice a difference. You probably need one. 240GB units are quite affordable too.
 
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Yeah, I've pretty much concluded I want one, but given the SATA II and considering access times, is there a meaningful difference for me between say, the Samsung 850 EVO and the ADATA SP550 (or similar cheap models)? The SS costs almost twice as much. I guess the main task it will be used for is the Photoshop scratch disk and Win pagefile. I've probably been spoiled by having that in RAM, but there's just not enough of it. Is the 850 gonna be faster AND last longer?
 
echter said:
currently I've got the main Photoshop scratch disk assigned to RAM, as well as the Win 7 pagefile and the Firefox disk cache. The idea is to shift the pagefile and and scratch disk over to the SSD which will free up about 1.7 gb of RAM.
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You have the Windows page file assigned to a RAMdisk? If so, that's incredibly counterproductive.

I would move the Firefox disk cache to the SSD too.
 
Well, if he really wants one in RAM, it's possible to have two - one on an SSD and one (small one) in RAM.
But I'd echo that you'll be better off with putting the pagefile on the SSD as well. No, you probably won't run into flash wear.
Also, personally I also disable the prefetcher service in 7 when using a SSD. No point in using up RAM if you're a photoshop person and the SSD is plenty fast to serve all the stuff you mentioned.
 
echter said:
Yeah, I've pretty much concluded I want one, but given the SATA II and considering access times, is there a meaningful difference for me between say, the Samsung 850 EVO and the ADATA SP550 (or similar cheap models)? Is the 850 gonna be faster AND last longer?
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"Last longer" doesn't matter for you, as in it's extremely unlikely any modern SSD will reach its endurance limits within, say, 5 years. It's much more likely to die before then of some kind of electronic failure, and that's one reason to not prefer off-brands like ADATA.

But since you won't be storing any kind of important data on the drive, I'd say you don't need the Evo. Go cheap. But maybe consider something in the middle on sale -- for example, as of this reply, Amazon has the Crucial BX100 240GB for $70 -- same as the 120GB Evo. The BX100 will be a better performer than the ADATA SP550. Stay away from the BX200s though.
 
michalrz said:
Well, if he really wants one in RAM, it's possible to have two - one on an SSD and one (small one) in RAM.
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Since the idea of a page file is to act as an overflow for RAM, for normal use it doesn't make sense to artificially reduce available RAM by reserving some of it for use as a page file -- it's a needless cycle.

michalrz said:
Also, personally I also disable the prefetcher service in 7 when using a SSD. No point in using up RAM if you're a photoshop person and the SSD is plenty fast to serve all the stuff you mentioned.
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Yes, good point. Definitely don't forget to do this.
 
honestly man...this screams you need a new PC...Seriously 300 dollar laptops are faster....

What is the processor? I wouldn't be surprised if even the 50 dollar skylakes might even be faster.

Reason why i am saying this is because Core 2 to Sky lake there is like a 2x single thread speed difference....
 
SomeGuy133 said:
What is the processor? I wouldn't be surprised if even the 50 dollar skylakes might even be faster.
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Assuming he has the most common quad-core for that chipset, the Q6600, then yes:


  • Q6600 CPU Mark: 2987 (922 single-threaded)
  • Pentium G4400: 3716 (1844 single-threaded) -- cheapest available Skylake at $65 retail boxed
 
I think it is no problem. I use a ssd in my old pc. it is core 2 duo cpu and os is winxp
 
izx said:
Assuming he has the most common quad-core for that chipset, the Q6600, then yes:


  • Q6600 CPU Mark: 2987 (922 single-threaded)
  • Pentium G4400: 3716 (1844 single-threaded) -- cheapest available Skylake at $65 retail boxed
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shetu said:
I think it is no problem. I use a ssd in my old pc. it is core 2 duo cpu and os is winxp
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Uguu
 
I run a similar setup. XP on an ancient Merom laptop. Adding a SSD did make a whole lot of difference. And I can always take it out and use it in another machine. SSDs are a must nowadays! Your expensive powerful multi core CPUs are sitting around and waiting for the hard drive.
Then there's option three. Get yourself a speedy 32 GB or so thumbdrive and use that for stratch space.
So you have SSD+thumbdrive as your enhancers.
One thing I keep in RAM is the Firefox cache.
 
I completely agree that switching to an SSD is a relatively cheap and time-efficient way to eke more life out of an old computer. The unusual thing about OP's case is:

  • He's apparently happy with leaving the OS on the hard drive, when most of the "SSD shock" for first-time switchers is due to the increased responsiveness of the OS.
  • He's using this (almost 9-year) old computer as his primary workstation.
There's a very good chance that even with an SSD for scratch space, Photoshop will be bottlenecked by his CPU.
 
izx said:
I completely agree that switching to an SSD is a relatively cheap and time-efficient way to eke more life out of an old computer. The unusual thing about OP's case is:

  • He's apparently happy with leaving the OS on the hard drive, when most of the "SSD shock" for first-time switchers is due to the increased responsiveness of the OS.
  • He's using this (almost 9-year) old computer as his primary workstation.
There's a very good chance that even with an SSD for scratch space, Photoshop will be bottlenecked by his CPU.
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thats what i am saying...if he is doing photoshop he really needs a new rig. That CPU is terrible comparatively and he would be better off upgrading to a whole new rig with 16GB of RAM, decent CPU, and a decent SSD.

It is well past upgrade time...if he is so broke that a new rig is too much money then why get an SSD? It is kinda silly...its the point of upgrade time. Hell snag a used rig off craigs list if that poor. A 200 dollar PC off craigslist would be faster!
 
Well, if my Q9550 finally became annoying to use around 2015 (bought it in 2008), I imagine the Q6600 with the latest and greatest Photoshop will indeed suffer. No arguing here.
.
Yes, photoshop will start up very quickly, it will load your images to memory swiftly, but you will still suffer freezes while working on large images.
I would recommend a SSD because there will be a difference, and he can keep it around for his next rig.
Other than that, OP, if you're working with like 20 Mpx images then I'm afraid that bottleneck will, as others mentioned, still be there.
Would it be completely crazy to suggest a 6 or 8 core from AMD to the OP as well as a SSD? Do new versions of Photoshop benefit from high core count?
 
michalrz said:
Well, if my Q9550 finally became annoying to use around 2015 (bought it in 2008), I imagine the Q6600 with the latest and greatest Photoshop will indeed suffer. No arguing here.
.
Yes, photoshop will start up very quickly, it will load your images to memory swiftly, but you will still suffer freezes while working on large images.
I would recommend a SSD because there will be a difference, and he can keep it around for his next rig.
Other than that, OP, if you're working with like 20 Mpx images then I'm afraid that bottleneck will, as others mentioned, still be there.
Would it be completely crazy to suggest a 6 or 8 core from AMD to the OP as well as a SSD? Do new versions of Photoshop benefit from high core count?
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they do but i still would rather have good single thread over many cores.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
they do but i still would rather have good single thread over many cores.
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Yeah, I hear you, it's how I operate. My CPU of choice for friends and work are high clocked i3. Anyone tried them in Photoshop though? Or i5? Sorry if this has been aswered.
 
michalrz said:
Yeah, I hear you, it's how I operate. My CPU of choice for friends and work are high clocked i3. Anyone tried them in Photoshop though? Or i5? Sorry if this has been aswered.
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dont know i am horrible single thread starved so i buy the best single thread processor possible...everyone is single thread limited but i wont elaborate (no one cares).
 
I for one care and would like to hear your opinion. PM me if you like.
I partially agree - going from AMD's six cores, old Core 2 Quads to 22nm celerons was quite amazing. Very, very responsive.
However Photoshop and other large suites, like CAD software, ray-tracing rendering... do these fall under this rule of thumb? Don't respond if you don't want to, it's all good :)
 
Thanks for all the advice. It looks like I'll avoid the ADATA, though I'm still not sure if it's worth say, getting another brand's cheaper 120 vs the Crucial BX100 240gb or Samsung 850 120gb which are the same price. I was disappointed the Crucial 120 was practically the same as the 240, but oh well.

As far as getting a new PC, yes I realize the advantages of that (cpu is an E6750). This is just a temporary measure. Buying a motherboard, RAM, video card and CPU isn't in the budget right now. I know you can do it cheaply and still improve, but for a full upgrade, I'd want to go a little further and future proof it a bit, which requires more $. For now, this machine is mostly used for web, photoshop and a raw converter, so I'd like to see if the SSD is going to be enough for a while. It can always be transfered to a new system whenever.

Yes, it's the Windows pagefile in RAM. I had read advice against, but before doing it I watched the usage closely in performance monitor and found that actually very little was being written to it, so I reduced the size dramatically and put it in RAM because apparently Windows prefers to have a pagefile and make small writes to it whether it's really needed or not. I figured no need using the hard drive for it. But at that time my memory usage was lower. With the SSD I will definitely move that and the Photoshop disk out of RAM. BTW, I'm not using a new photoshop. It's CS2 and does most anything I want. It's just that 24mp images eat memory/scratch space.
 
izx said:
There's a very good chance that even with an SSD for scratch space, Photoshop will be bottlenecked by his CPU.
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True, it already is, but the only problem I'm expecting to solve with this is running out of memory. I'm going to reduce the size of the RAMdisk while putting the scratch disk and pagefile on something faster than a hard drive.
 
echter said:
True, it already is, but the only problem I'm expecting to solve with this is running out of memory. I'm going to reduce the size of the RAMdisk while putting the scratch disk and pagefile on something faster than a hard drive.
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If you intend to use the SSD in any new system in the future as a main drive, definitely go for a 240 GB. The Crucial 240 GB is on sale, otherwise it's also around 80% more expensive than the 120GB version.

The Evos and all the cheapest new drives use TLC flash which is cheap, but also slower and has lower lifetimes. If you check reviews, the Adata 550 has to use a "cache" of faster flash so that its TLC slowness doesn't become apparent.

The Samsung Pros, higher-end drives and older drives (like the BX100) use MLC flash which is inherently faster and longer-lasting. In normal desktop use though, TLC lifetimes are good enough for most.

In general, SSDs are so fast because internally they read/write in parallel to multiple chips. Historically, the 60/120GB models in a series were slower at writes because they used fewer chips than the 240GB and higher versions. This appears to no longer be universally true with the tricks the new TLC drives use such as a fast flash cache.
 
My experience with SSD on SATA2 were extremely positive...

I had an old Acer laptop circa 2009 with an i5-540M and a 320GB 5400rpm HDD running Win7 Ultimate x64. Boot times were around 2.5 mins.

After installing a 240GB Kingston HyperX 3K that was 1 : 1 cloned, the boot times were around 25-35 seconds. That's a full boot, from power off state, to fully loaded Win desktop.

Go for it.
 
pay close attention to reviews of 120GB and 250GB size drives. They can be vastly different in performance due to using 1/2 nands. I would never buy a 120GB drive personally. Expensive per GB and very slow. Also 250GB drive range there is a very large difference from higher and lower end ones. Vs 500GB drives and because of the nand sizes.
 
echter said:
(cpu is an E6750). This is just a temporary measure.
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I'd highly recommend throwing $20 at eBay on a C2D E8600 at least, or $45 on a C2Q 9650 as another temporary upgrade to squeeze more life out of your platform. Photoshop CS2 does support multi-threading although you may need to download and apply an update from Adobe.
 
izx said:
I'd highly recommend throwing $20 at eBay on a C2D E8600 at least, or $45 on a C2Q 9650 as another temporary upgrade to squeeze more life out of your platform. Photoshop CS2 does support multi-threading although you may need to download and apply an update from Adobe.
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at that point he is investing 200-300 bucks and might as well just trash it. Sorry for being repetitive but this this is old and even throwing in an old but faster CPU is wasteful in my eyes unless you plan on keeping it online as a "fuck up and nuke PC". Even then those lenovos with quad core HW Xeons that go for 285-300...might as well just get one of those if money is tight. Not the best single thread but leagues better than that!
 
izx said:
How? His mobo supports those CPUs already. Assuming $70 max for the SSD, that's either $90 or $120 with the CPU....nowhere close to 200.
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I was thinking 500GB sorry. that's where the 200 came from....the 300 was just overshoot to make a point.

45+150~200

he could just get the 300 dollar lenovo plus extra RAM plus SSD and have a system 2-4 times faster for like 400-500 minus 100 for selling his old computer for 300-400 total.

Granted if he only uses the PC 1 hour a week then fuck it. Don't upgrade but if he uses it any considerable amount of time your'll probably earn your money back in saved time. I am on the PC all the time so its worth the investment to have a snappy PC. Plus its a hobby so i win and win :D

My dad had an old Q something and it was painful to use.I switched it to a 3770 which i even consider slow but was night and day better...my dad even agreed so this isn't even coming from me. So i can't even imagine how bad this thing is. I think my 300 dollar SB netbook is probably close to it and i loathe using that sucker because its so slow. Plus its limited to 8GB and i get memory errors just from browsing :/
 
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izx said:
If you intend to use the SSD in any new system in the future as a main drive, definitely go for a 240 GB. The Crucial 240 GB is on sale, otherwise it's also around 80% more expensive than the 120GB version.

The Evos and all the cheapest new drives use TLC flash which is cheap, but also slower and has lower lifetimes. If you check reviews, the Adata 550 has to use a "cache" of faster flash so that its TLC slowness doesn't become apparent.

The Samsung Pros, higher-end drives and older drives (like the BX100) use MLC flash which is inherently faster and longer-lasting. In normal desktop use though, TLC lifetimes are good enough for most.

In general, SSDs are so fast because internally they read/write in parallel to multiple chips. Historically, the 60/120GB models in a series were slower at writes because they used fewer chips than the 240GB and higher versions. This appears to no longer be universally true with the tricks the new TLC drives use such as a fast flash cache.
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Informative! All of that does make the Crucial 240 sound like the best deal. And like you say I could just make it part of the next build. I'd really rather not put much of anything else into this one, since as everyone points out, a real upgrade will be a priority soon. I want to see how this goes with the SSD first though.

From the reaction, I know it sounds unbearable to some, but I guess it's a matter of what you get used to. CPU speed would be nice - fast laptops were even mentioned - but for me it's more about driving my 2 monitors and having the space I want for image display/editing/cataloging and web/video. I can't imagine being confined to the much faster 15.6" worlds most of my friends seem happy with.
 
echter said:
Informative! All of that does make the Crucial 240 sound like the best deal. And like you say I could just make it part of the next build. I'd really rather not put much of anything else into this one, since as everyone points out, a real upgrade will be a priority soon. I want to see how this goes with the SSD first though.

From the reaction, I know it sounds unbearable to some, but I guess it's a matter of what you get used to. CPU speed would be nice - fast laptops were even mentioned - but for me it's more about driving my 2 monitors and having the space I want for image display/editing/cataloging and web/video. I can't imagine being confined to the much faster 15.6" worlds most of my friends seem happy with.
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oh the comments about the laptops were to point out how terrible your computer is compared to modern day stuff ;) It was not a recommendation to buy one :D

supposedly the EVOs (850s) are comparable to planar MLC due to it is 3D NAND and also a much higher nm...or at least that is what i am told.

also check reviews from several sources on 250GB drives. There is a much larger difference in those vs 500GB/1TB drives. Its due to how many channels and dies are actually in the SSD. Some 2404GB SSDs have only one die verse several so they can be substantially slower vs their 250GB competition. Also 240GB drives suffer from bad consistency more so make sure you OP the drive since its manufacture OP is already smaller.
 
I have an old Celeron PC from my parents that I took when I put a Zotac i3 on their desk.
E8500 was all of $25 and a 128GB ssd was $60 (A-Data) machine is VERY fast and boots Windows 7 in 13 seconds...
 
In SATA II situations I always go for the Kingston V300's. I know people hate them but I've rolled out dozens of them and not a single one has failed and they will push and pull 275MBps+ all day long. Solid little SSDs.

Plus they are usually the cheapest and easiest to get hold of. Some folks put far too much thought into all this when it isn't required.
 
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