Upgrade to SSD Drive? Is it worth it?

Magoo

Magoo

Magoo

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Location
Christchurch.
My machine has become quite sluggish. Was thinking of getting a Samsung 250gb SSD 840 drive for Windows 7. Is it worth it or do I have any other major bottlenecks on my system? See my specs below.

Many thx in advance.
 
Short answer is the one one of my mates gave me years ago:
An SSD is the oddest upgrade you'll buy. It won't increase screen res or give you a higher FPS. It won't make your Interwebnets quicker or let you store more movies. But it will make your whole machine 'feel' like one 10x quicker.
Yes, an SSD is pretty much awesome. And I upgraded from RAID0 Raptors.
 
Seems your motherboard has no Sata 3 ports to extract full performance from a Sata 3 SSD.

However, if you do upgrade, "sluggish" will vanish (unless there is something actually wrong with your system, like a Virus or Malware infection). The lack of Sata 3 will "hold back" the SSD somewhat, but the real world loss of performance is not going to be a problem to you.

Do it. The previous post says it all, really.
 
It's also worth taking into account that an SSD is one of those upgrades that will carry over to a new build and continue to give you the performance boost (even more so assuming a new build would have sata 3) as opposed to buying faster ram or getting a faster cpu for your socket.
 
Definitely, the non pro version is a lot slower but as your motherboard holds you back it won't be an issue as you'll never reach the expected speeds on SATA2 ports.

So 120gb or 250gb samsung is a good choice :)
 
Scotteh said:
Definitely, the non pro version is a lot slower but as your motherboard holds you back it won't be an issue as you'll never reach the expected speeds on SATA2 ports.

So 120gb or 250gb samsung is a good choice :)
Click to expand...

I keep saying it, the 250gb non-pro will perform just as well as the pro version in everday use. Benchmarks might reveal a slower write speed, but if you were to install a pro and an non-pro in identical PCs, and ask someone to spot the difference in normal use, I bet they wouldn't be able to.
 
Yep another vote for the 840 Samsung here.

I've recently gone from a sata II to an SSD it's quite unreal how quick it is.
 
wazza300 said:
read speeds are the most important,the faster it reads your data the quicker things load/run ect
Click to expand...

And even read speeds are not as important to the performance than you might think. The real advantage of an SSD comes with it's very low access time compared to a hard drive. Yes, my "fast" 840 250GB on a SATA 3 port is faster than my old Intel X25 80gb on a SATA 2 port. On paper, it's at least twice as fast. In the real world, it is quicker, but it doesn't "feel" twice as fast.

And to those who keep pointing out that the non-pro has a write speed of "only" 250Mb/s, that's as fast as my Intel's read spped, and it was plenty quick enough !
 
sata 6gb/s is sata 3 speeds

sata 3gb/s is sata2 speeds

it will still be fast tho,faster than any mechanical hdd
 
That's why they used to use SATA II and SATA III to avoid confusion like that :p.

Access times are orders of magnitude faster than HDD's even on the older generation ssd's.
 
Magoo said:
I thought my board has Integrated high speed SATA 3Gb/s? Is this not SATA 3?

http://uk.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2846#sp
Click to expand...

Sorry, it can be a bit confusing.

Bottom line...... Any SSD will improve your PC (a lot). I'd go for a Crucial or a Samsung (I`ve installed more than a few of each). The size and version is up to you. I believe that the Samsung 840 250GB non-pro is the "sweet spot", but it's all down to your wallet ;).
 
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