Few basic SSD questions

cheddar

cheddar

cheddar

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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.
 
Im pretty sure any ssd will work fine. As long as your running win7 just get a current crop sata3 SSD. It will just have slightly lower transfer rates which are probably not that noticeable. Any of the current drives are decent. I have my adta on sata 2 and it flies.
 
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 :).
 
Orcvader said:
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 :).
Click to expand...

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?
 
you should do it before yeh or it will confuse windows :P
as for what drive i duno read some reviews make ur own mind up, ocz octane looks interesting and the corsair pro is getting good reviews, or even the samsung

i have 3 pc and all have ssd now, never had any problems and i wouldn't go back!
oh and one of the pc is sata2, i don't notice any difference, how often do you transfer files at over 300mbps, not often i think
 
cheddar said:
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?
Click to expand...

It's a BIOS setting yes, you can enable it after install but there's no reason to not install with it in the first place.
 
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?
 
For TRIM to work you only need Windows 7 and a SSD which supports it. Whether your in AHCI mode or not doesn't matter. There's a slight difference in speed when not using AHCI just.
 
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.
 
ShadowMan said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
It will work in IDE mode but wont have full performance and will miss a few advanced features. You should see an improvement though as seek times will still be better.

My Crucial M4 on a SATA2 port is getting an awful throughput rate but the seek times means it still loads quicker for programs and the OS in general.
 
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