Few basic SSD questions

[cheddar]

I am planning on doing a few upgrades to my current system, it is around two/three old (Q6600). I was planning on simply getting a SSD drive and also a ATI 7850 when they come out, which hopefully will take me through the next year.

This will be my first SSD drive so I am a bit unsure even they will even work with my current setup. I have a ABIT IP35V motherboard, I presume you just hook them upto the SATA connector?

So on with the questions, will a SSD work on my system, will I need to upgrade anything in terms of drivers (running WIN7)? I presume I won't get the data transfer rate with my current system that I would with a new motherboard?

I was looking at getting a 120GB drive, maybe a OCZ? Ideally I want something that I can use in a new system at some later point, are the drives backward compatible or will I need to get a older SSD?

Any recommendations in terms of what drive to get, I keep reading about people having issues with drives and having to flash them and do crazy stuff to their bios of the their motherboards.

 

[cheddar]

Make sure your board has AHCI mode first so the TRIM function on the SSD will be enabled.

Apart from that, any SSD will do. It will work with any SATA ports as they're all backwards compatible. But your board only has SATA 2 ports, so the max speed you'll get is ~280mb/s. However since the seek time is so low, you'll still find the drive to be really responsive and fast since it doesn't need to spin up a disk like a HDD.

I would get the Crucial M4, seems to be the most reliable drive so far (on firmwire 0309) compared to the other SSDs. Got one myself and have had no problems with it .

So the AHCI is a bios setting? Do I need to turn that on before I install the drive or can I do it after?

 

[cheddar]

OK I just had a quick look and didn't see anything called AHCI in the bios. I have room for two more SATA devices as my HD and DVD drive are both SATA.

The only thing I saw that looked even remotely similiar was ACPI, which was some power management setting.

Any suggestions?

 

[cheddar]

AHCI should be in the settings for Integrated Peripherals or some such. It is an option under the SATA mode.

Find your SATA mode setting and change it. Options will normally be IDE, RAID and AHCI.

Pretty sure the only options I saw were IDE and Raid, so where does this leave me?

The poster above me stated that I don't need to have the settings in the bios if I am running windows 7 (I am running Win 7), i'm a little bit confused here.