Sasquatch Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 Just ordered a 60Gb SSD drive which I intend to put Windows and the programs on. Can't really afford much bigger, but the promised increase in loading speeds makes it seem worth a punt even though my board only supports SATA 2 and these things are mostly built for 3. I think I've got installation sussed but don't know anyone who uses one so I thought I'd invite comments and opinions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soto Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 (edited) What drive is it? You may need to update the firmware to get the best performance and life out of the drive. I have an old crucial one though and it's still got plenty of life in it after using it on and off for 3 years. Even the crappiest SSDs seem to make a world of difference to computer performance but yes, it helps if you have Sata 3. Edited February 14, 2016 by soto 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaqen H'gar Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 (edited) I've had an ssd for my main drive for about a year now. The silence is nice, load times are faster and you defo notice the performance increase using something like photoshop for example. If the prices were a lot lower I would replace all my hard drives. Edited February 14, 2016 by Jaqen H'gar Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inspiration101 Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 (edited) Great choice to fit an SSD, they are backwards compatible so should be fine. I switch all my users data hdd's to SSD because they make for a much happier user - faster load times, silent operation, and cheap for what they do ! Total win, great choice. Edited February 14, 2016 by Inspiration101 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iBMe Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 Make sure your sata ports are set to AHCI mode (and not IDE/auto) in your bios before installing the OS on it for the best performance. Other than that they are pretty much plug and play. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GreenVision Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 SSD is where its at now... Much better than HDD's.. The amount of data storage space is not as cheap as HDD, but give it another year and HDD's wil only be found in second hand shops... GV. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bird Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 SSD is where its at now... Much better than HDD's.. The amount of data storage space is not as cheap as HDD, but give it another year and HDD's wil only be found in second hand shops... GV. Not for external drives they won't. I bought a 4Tb drive for £100. I can't see SSD competing with that price for a while. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mrrichiet Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 (edited) Not for external drives they won't. I bought a 4Tb drive for £100. I can't see SSD competing with that price for a while. I read this article the other day (www.computerworld.com/article/3030642/data-storage/flash-memorys-density-surpasses-hard-drives-for-first-time.html) which was quite interesting\relevant. It tends to back up your point too, though for how much longer?? "That doesn't mean that the price is going to reach parity with hard drives because the factories to build flash are still a lot more expensive to build than the hard drive factories -- especially the 3D NAND; it's something like a $10 billion plant," Edited February 14, 2016 by mrrichiet 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greenfinger53 Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 Possibly the best value for money upgrade you can make. 60Gb will get windows and a couple of games / programs you use heavily installed. Easy to do, fit the drive and boot up with a windows disk in or setup a flash drive with the windows files. Once its installed get the latest drivers for your components from the relevant websites (or download them now and keep on a flash drive / secondary hard drive) 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stoned Whale Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 I for years thought SSDs were for the elite gamers and hardcore video editors etc and had ignored any info on them for years. But just built my own PC and wow the difference in everything between my SSD and my storage HDD is amazing. Firstly the noise, everytime I access storage the HDD spins up. You get used to the silence without it . It should improve your performance quite a bit though. Especially boot times. 60gb be enough for system and the pagefile. Maybe a couple games or your most used programs. Not sure about it being SATA 2, not sure what the bottlenecks are at with SSDs for performance but I bet it still is a huge difference. Access times are just so fast that data transfer rate probably isn't the main factor. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bird Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 I'm planning a SSD upgrade too soon and my board will only take SATA2 as well. One thing I have read is that the SATA2/3 selection is often by a jumper on the drive itself. So if fitting the drive involves major surgery (like mine) you want to select that before starting or you may well end up doing the job twice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greenfinger53 Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 I used to work in a returns department and saw thousands of SSDs, never saw a single jumper. They just pluh and play sata 2 or 3. Samsung, Kingston, Crucial and Intel where always the most reliable. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bird Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 I used to work in a returns department and saw thousands of SSDs, never saw a single jumper. They just pluh and play sata 2 or 3. Samsung, Kingston, Crucial and Intel where always the most reliable. Thanks, I shall bear that in mind. I definitely read a tale of woe about it with the same model as mine, so I will re-read it & check before starting out on the upgrade. I hope that is how it works as the upgrade is difficult enough already. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joint hogger Posted February 14, 2016 Share Posted February 14, 2016 imo, a 60gb ssd is a bit small but should be ok for your OS, tho i dont think you'll get many games on it as well, i use a ocb 128gb as my main drive & have just bought a 500gb for the same money as the 128gb cost 3 years ago. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sasquatch Posted February 14, 2016 Author Share Posted February 14, 2016 Thanks everybody, some useful advice and encouragement. My current 10 64 bit takes up about 13Gb of the hard drive plus 2 for the page file and 3 or so for the hibernation file, I'm not a gamer so I don't expect to find myself running short of space. The brand is Zheino, Chinese and I've not heard of them before but I checked out reviews for several of their products and they didn't have any bad ones. Other Chinese brands didn't get any reviews at all and some of the major brands had some surprisingly bad ones, particularly Kingston and Transcend. Corsair and Samsung were the most highly rated though at a price of course. It seems size can affect performance, SSDs under 120Gb don't work as fast as those larger. I'll get a bigger one when i can afford it provided SATA2 hasn't turned out to be too much of a limiting factor. SSDs over 1Tb are still seriously expensive but if they are to capture the laptop/notebook/tablet market they ought to get cheaper. Thanks again. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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