SSD and oldish MB

D.Roberts · 7 Oct 2012 at 13:56

Hi all I have this setup at the moment

Asus striker extreme (the first one it does not support AHCI or what ever its called all so it does not support TRIM in the BIOS any way)

Q6700 @ stock speeds (for now)

ATI 4870 1GB @ stock speeds

4GB of ram

I was looking at getting this SSD or some other SSD

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-048-OC&groupid=701&catid=2104&subcat=1427

But I am worried that I may be waasting my money as my mother board does not support AHCI or TRIM nor is it 6gbps only 3gbps though I know this SSD is back wards compatible.

Should I just get a 500gb hard drive and not an SSD.
Does any one else have an SSD connected to this mother board? please advise.

Thanks

wazza300 · 7 Oct 2012 at 15:23

you should be able to set ahci in the bios? and trim is supported in windows 7 not the bios so you'll be fine regarding that

D.Roberts · 7 Oct 2012 at 16:01

Hi thanks for the reply.

I am sure AHCI is not supported on my mother board as I had a look ages ago and reviews all so suggest its not an optoin even with latest BIOS updates

Kotu · 7 Oct 2012 at 16:29

I wouldn't worry about TRIM too much, it's nice to have since it keeps the write performance up over time, but the main advantage of a SSD over a normal drive is the read speeds and the random access time.

D.Roberts · 7 Oct 2012 at 16:58

So if my mother board dont support AHCI that I am sure it does not what performance should I expect instead or what will it effect not having AHCI?

Kotu · 7 Oct 2012 at 17:31

read speeds should be the same (so ~280MB/s for the linked drive)
write speeds will start out similar (~250MB/s) and will eventually drop to around ~120MB/s

Compared to a normal drive, it will likely be around twice as fast for reads and about the same for writes (for sequential). For random reads/writes, SSDs are always about 100x faster (due to big difference in seek times).

EDIT: bear in the mind the SSD speeds might be lower if the motherboards controller isn't that great, I would still expect them to be within 75% of the SSD stated speeds though.

D.Roberts · 7 Oct 2012 at 18:44

Thats great thanks very much.

If it really is poor I could all ways invest in a dedicated controller as sold by OCUK so its not really a huge problem just more expense LOL