Can I setup SSD on a ASUS P5K-E WIFI?

[Steven P. Administrators]

My PC is old but serves the purpose :P

 

Now I'm looking to upgrade my drives and move Windows to an SSD if I can, but does this board support it? Also, I have zero experience with SSD's so any pointers would be helpful, cheers!

[The Evil Overlord]

I'm waiting on an SSD drive myself to use in my 11 year old pc. (Asus M2N-Sli deluxe) I'll keep you posted. But at first thought, I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Worst case would be my, (or your) motherboard doesn't support the high speed aspect for the drive.

[yowanvista]

This board is quite old but should nevertheless be able to handle SSDs since it supports SATA2, although this might limit the SSD speeds. You might want to consider a new system as that current hardware might bottleneck SSD performance.

[ZakO]

Yeah, I had a Samsung 830 on my old P5K-E, worked fine, of course as mentioned above it's only SATA2 so the read/write maxes out at about 200-250MB/s rather than the 450-500MB/s the drive is capable of, still much faster than a mechanical HDD though.

[Brian M. Veteran]

What PCI-e slots have you used? That board has 1 x16 and 1 x4 IIRC? You could pop a PCI-e sata 3 card in there - and then I'd probably look at the Samsung 840 Pro. I have 2 of them in my iMac in Raid 0 - they're brilliant disks!

[Steven P. Administrators]

Yeah the 1 x4 slot is free. I'll have to look if the GPU card overlaps it though. Cheers for the comments guys.

[Hum]

Get an SSD the same size (or larger) as your regular hard drive, then clone the old drive to the SSD.

[JJ_]

I hear PCI-e and boot drives are a match made in hell :D Like yowanvista mentioned any SSD will default to SATA2 speeds but it should still trump the performance you currently see with a mechanical boot drive. I would go with the Samsung 840 non-pro drive and stick in a 3.5" bracket into a SATA port

[Steven P. Administrators]

One more question, if I buy the Samsung 840 (Basic) SSD drive do I need brackets or can it be installed into a normal 3.5" bay?

 

Here they are selling a kit, or non kit version but there's nothing about included cables or brackets :s http://www.mycom.nl/componenten/solid-state-drive/alle-ssds/10059/samsung-840-basic-120gb-kit#goto-others

[Julius Caro]

Not long ago I installed a Samsung 840 (not the pro) on this very same board. No problems at all, just the usual, make sure ACHI is enabled and whatever. The Sata2 bottleneck does apply indeed (I think both read and write max at around 250 MB/s when one of them is supposed to be up to 500MB/s, but this is expected). 

 

 

And yeah you will most likely need brackets, but which brackets will depend on your case. Brackets are like 5 bucks tho

[PGHammer]

Not long ago I installed a Samsung 840 (not the pro) on this very same board. No problems at all, just the usual, make sure ACHI is enabled and whatever. The Sata2 bottleneck does apply indeed (I think both read and write max at around 250 MB/s when one of them is supposed to be up to 500MB/s, but this is expected). 

 

 

And yeah you will most likely need brackets, but which brackets will depend on your case. Brackets are like 5 bucks tho

Most older chipsets support AHCI; however, there are some exceptions (Intel's G3x/G4x with their default southbridges are two of them, oddly enough - though both older and newer southbridges DO support the spec).  The bigger issue, in both cases, is the top speed supported (a major issue for G3x, but not G4x).  But even with that, most SSDs make standard HDDs seem like tortoises.

[Steven P. Administrators]

My board is already switched to AHCI, cheers for the responses guys. I'll probably go to the store to pick this up then rather than order online.

[The Evil Overlord]

One more question, if I buy the Samsung 840 (Basic) SSD drive do I need brackets or can it be installed into a normal 3.5" bay?

 

Here they are selling a kit, or non kit version but there's nothing about included cables or brackets :s http://www.mycom.nl/componenten/solid-state-drive/alle-ssds/10059/samsung-840-basic-120gb-kit#goto-others

From what +Phouchg told me, they only come in 2.5 inch size, you will most likely need the bracket in your machine.

[Steven P. Administrators]

Yeah that's why I need to go to the store and find out of the "kit" version comes with that as it doesn't say on the page. The non kit version is ?20 cheaper. I'm going with the 128GB version because that's all the boot/windows drive should ever need.

[The Evil Overlord]

Yeah that's why I need to go to the store and find out of the "kit" version comes with that as it doesn't say on the page. The non kit version is ?20 cheaper. I'm going with the 128GB version because that's all the boot/windows drive should ever need.

I'm a cheapskate, ordered mine from China for ?2 (the caddy, that is :p)

[Steven P. Administrators]

K so I called the store to find out what a KIT is, and they said it includes software (basically retail version), no cable or bracket so I'll have to order them separately. I can get the one for ?20 less (OEM) and download the software, no? (that's if I even need it).