Posted 16 September 2012 - 21:06
An SSD will speed up pretty much ANY PC that can swallow them.
Older PCs are generally going to have one or more of three "gotchas" concerning SSDs:
1. SATA ports are too slow. (The oldest of system boards with native SATA (such as Intel's 8xx chipsets and the ICH5R southbridge) are constraining factors, because the transfer rate supported is slower than what an SSD (even an older one) can throw through it.)
2. Not *enough* SATA ports or no drivers installed (third-party SATA ports) - I lump the two together because some motherboards have both native *and* third-party SATA ports on the same board, and you may be only using the native ports right now. You go to add your SSD and the only ports left are the third-party ports - which you doubtless didn't enable because you don't use them.
3. Cache vs. bootable - I have a rather surprising take on this; the only time you *don't* want to boot from your SSD is if the capacity is less than 64GB AND you don't have bootable install media for your OS. If your SSD has a capacity greater than 64GB, you want to boot from it - especially on an older system. (If you only have two SATA ports, then you'd need a third-party SATA port card *anyway* - hang your data and optical drives on that. Put your fastest drive - the SSD - on the native ports and boot from it, where the performance does the greatest good.)
Price vs. capacity sweet spot - right now, the sweet spot for SSDs is in the 120/128GB size range - pricing is generally around $100USD (retail).
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