ssd SSD on fairly old system

[tuckeratlarge]

I have a reasonably old PC - Dell Studio 540 with quad core Q8200, 4 gigs of RAM and WD 640gig HDD - is it worth putting an SSD (thinking Samsung 830 256gig) in there? Thinking speed and stability.

Also if it is, Norton Ghost that bad boy or clean install?

[+Warwagon MVC]

I have a reasonably old PC - Dell Studio 540 with quad core Q8200, 4 gigs of RAM and WD 640gig HDD - is it worth putting an SSD (thinking Samsung 830 256gig) in there? Thinking speed and stability.

Also if it is, Norton Ghost that bad boy or clean install?

Yep go for it. Clone it and see what happens. Just remember if you clone it to disable things like the automatic defrag.

[+Fahim S. MVC]

Go for it - massive performance improvement, even on my Core 2 Duo E6400 (Conroe) after moving from 2x250GB 7200's in RAID0.

I used Windows Backup in Win 7 Ultimate and worked a charm.

[watchthisspace]

I'm rocking a set up quite similar to yours, but using an old Intel X25-M SSD. You will notice the improvements of an SSD. Definitely!

[PGHammer]

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).