SSD In an Older Rig

M

MagicalHobo

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May 27, 2011
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Hi guys,

I have an older rig, sporting an aBit IP35-E and a Q9550 at stock speeds (I tend to drag out my upgrade cycles), and I'm wondering about the practicality of putting an SSD into my rig. My mobo's BIOS do NOT have the option of switching to a RAID or AHCI mode for the SATA ports, nor does it support 6Gb/s data rates. I understand that I will take a bit of a performance hit (thanks to my Googling) due to these facts, but could I still see a noticeable benefit in performance compared to the 7200 RPM HDD in my computer now? Another big question is that will this SSD be viable enough in one to three years from now for use in a new PC build (I'm not sure if that can be determined at this point in time but I figured I'd ask)? Or should I just hold off for now and wait until the new build? The primary use of this SSD would be my OS, games, and other applications while using the HDD I have now for storage of data.

Thanks for any help I receive!
 
In any case, you will still see a performance boost over a standard spinning disk, and have something you can bring forward to a future build.
 
I have an SSD in my wife's computer. It's an older motherboard than yours and a slower dual core processor. It is blazing fast. It boots and launches programs faster than any i7 with a Hard Drive. Go with an SSD, once you have one you can never look back. It will change what you expect out of a computer.
 
I put an SSD in my old Core Duo laptop (not Core 2 Duo), and it was great! When I got a new laptop I just move the SSD to it *shrug*.
 
If you're going to make a computer every 6 or 8 years maybe chose the higher end motherboard next time ? With the IP35 you would have had RAID and AHCI.

I would still go SSD all the way, I'm dreaming of putting one in my Pentium M laptop, but it's PATA unfortunately.
 
Aesma said:
If you're going to make a computer every 6 or 8 years maybe chose the higher end motherboard next time ? With the IP35 you would have had RAID and AHCI.
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I am aware of this. However, I was considerably younger back then and did not think of these things like I do now. Trust me, now that it's been five years, I see all the stupid mistakes I made and I aim not to make them again, hence this thread. However, I do appreciate your input and the input of everyone else though. I may drop the cash for an SSD if more positive comments come in. I just don't want to push the drive past its prime before I start building my next computer nor do I want to spend the money now if the benefit is minimal.
 
It's really simple. If it's got a SATA port, it's worth putting an SSD in it. :)

But seriously, when you think about it, 99% of the time you're waiting on the disk, no matter how fast your PC is. When you can put in something that improves the random access speeds 100x or more, it's going to make a massive difference, period. In fact, older PCs tend to benefit a lot, since limited RAM means they're swapping to disk much more often.

Since you don't have AHCI support, just make sure the SSD you get has decent garbage collection of its own. Almost all the current drives do these days, so lack of TRIM isn't going to hurt that much, if at all.
 
Yes, get the SSD if you can afford it. It will make a tremendous difference, even in your system. Zero millisecond access time is a wonderful thing.

And AHCI is not a requirement for TRIM, as the Microsoft IDE driver will pass TRIM commands to the drive (and I assume the Intel one will also).

Also, if you are going to get one, go ahead and get a good one like a Samsung 830 or Crucial M4, instead of trying to cut corners (perhaps thinking it won't matter since you don't have AHCI and SATA 6GB). That way when you do upgrade it'll still be relevant.
 
SSD's are good but not worth spending too much money on.. if you can get a decent priced one the speed is worth it.
 
mwroobel said:
Just wondering how many positive comments it will take to convince you?
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Just wanted to see a couple more opinions, that is all. I did post it at something like midnight my time, could very well limit my thread's exposure to those who DON'T think it's a good idea.

Thanks to all that replied. It doesn't really seem that buying it a year or so before I actually build a new PC will really matter, so I think I will purchase one and call it good.
 
I'd say they almost make more sense on some older rigs. It can breathe new life into an aging machine and make it feel usable and snappy. I see lots of sorta old Core 2 based laptops...and given they they still have quite reasonable CPU power and most people don't really use all the compute power that is there....the hard drive is almost always the weak point. Those older 5400 rpm laptop drives just make me want to stab myself in the eye every time I need to setup something...or reinstall the OS and run lots of windows updates....or do anything! An SSD completely changes that. It can make even an older rig downright pleasant to work on.
 
Dropped an SSD into my HTPC (Athlon 4450e, SATA II) and it made a pretty big difference. I'm sure I'm not getting 100% performance out of it but I wasn't going for that anyway.
 
I had a Q9550 that originally had a fast boot hard drive (Raptor 10K rpm). When I switched to a SSD it was night and day. I thought I had it good with the Raptor - the SSD is a completely different experience and I found even current i7 and i5 computers with fast mechanical hard drives like Caviar Blacks seemed sluggish (especially at boot) to my old Q9550. This is despite the fact I have old SSDs that don't support TRIM and are only 3Gbps. When I swapped out for a 3570K my desktop experience did *NOT* improve noticeably - clearly the hard drive is the limiting factor, even with a SSD so any improvements in that area are good. I don't recommend you put applications or games on the SSD (unless you get something huge) unless it is something you use constantly. There are many articles on how to move the Users and ProgramData directories into the data hard drive, which will reduce the amount of space the SSD requires (and thus making it cheaper and faster) and put less wear and tear on the SSD as it won't be dealing with temp files and such.
 
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