Should I upgrade to a SSD drive
 

Hi to all computer experts

My HP machine SATA drive died suddenly tonight. All I know is that my old motherboard chipeset can only support Four 3GB/s SATA ports. If I am planning to get an Intel SSD with 6GB/s, would I be getting extreme performance due to this hard drive upgrade ?

Please kindly advise.

The question is: Why don't you have an SSD already?

It will change your life. Even if you get a cheap-ass 120GB for 60 bux.

This.

You haven't lived until you've had an SSD.

Yes. Even though a SATA1 port only has bandwidth of 1.5Gb/s, only sequential read/write speeds will be hampered in real life situations. And even then, chances are you won't be transferring big file sizes all that often for it to be a big issue.

Would adding an SSD be worth it for a PC with these specs that I use primarily as an HTPC and for surfing from the couch?

Core 2 Duo E4300 (C) DC 1.8 GHz
800 MHz front side bus

2 GB
PC2-4200 MB/sec

MSI Radeon 4350

In most cases, I would recommend a SSD.. but if you're only going to be loading videos from it or running Chrome, save your money.

If you need lots of storage I wouldn't bother, if you don't need lots of storage you may as well since standard drives as so big now anyways.

edit: I mean as a replacement for a dying drive, I wouldn't spend money to add an extra one.

IMHO an SSD only helps significantly when there is a lot of disk activity. For me, I really only notice the benefits of an SSD during boot and when loading big programs like Photoshop. If I had an HTPC and I was willing to wait thru the boot, I would go for an HD. The HD will allow you to store more movies. An SSD works fine over a slow SATA connection, and is barely a hinderance. I believe the gains of an SSD are made primarily through the fast access times and high IOPS and NOT the higher sequential transfer rates. My 2 cents. I am sure many people will differ.

thanks for all your replies and this thread can now be closed.

I had a PC with Intel E2180 with 2gb ram and SATA2. Swapped the 250gb HD with a SSD SATA3, it is day and light difference. Don't expect it will improve video or game performance or calculation speed, but everything loads instantly.

The most noticeable difference for me going to SSD is how fast the computer starts up. Mine boots up in 10 seconds after switching to a SSD.

Where as before, I would wake up, turn on the computer, go brew my coffee, and then come back to a computer that's just launching windows.

I have a 5 year old PC. SSD has helped me much more than just boot up time. PC is far snappier than the old HDD (application startups, webpages loads, etc). Don't forget that mechanical HD (HDD) naturally runs slower over time (even if u defrag and do all the maintenance work) on an older desktop computer. It's definitely a worthy upgrade. It will change your desktop experience.

EDIT: Yes I am running on 3GB/s SATAII ports as well, and it's still a world of a difference.

If you turn this machine on and off a lot, then yes.

I actually have a fairly similar machine as my HTPC, and was using a SATA drive previously, until it died on me a few months ago. I replaced it with an SSD.

I used to leave the machine running because it would take too long to wake up from sleep and be ready to watch videos. Now with an SSD, it wakes up almost instantaneously, and it's mostly just waiting for the network connection to come back up. Makes a huge difference if your kid is waiting for it!

So I'm saving money from being able to put the machine to sleep when it's not being used.

I love my ssd :)

I read the title and immediately had to come to post...

YES.

I have a w7j from early 2006 and the hard drive was dying. Popped a ssd in and it feels so fast I forgot this was a 9 year old laptop. Make sure youre running TRIM (windows 7 and above) to preserve the life span of your drive

Go for SSD ~~~~~~~~

Everything loads crazy fast....

Day and Night difference for sureeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Like everyone else here says. There's never a situation where an SSD upgrade from a regular HDD won't help.

SSD for sure!! you dont need to get a big one if you wanna budget. Get one like 128gb and fit Window & startup programs . Fit everything else on a HDD !

they're affordable enough to be part of everyone's system
no regrets in getting mine

or SSD for system + HDD for storage.

not only if it starts quicker, but it loads browser, application and moving files much quicker

Should have already switched 2 years ago!

Be a man and do da rai fing!

i switched, dual hard drived my laptop, i don't know why i didn't do this years ago.

I went SSD when the prices were reasonable and boy what a huge diff, got to the point I bought another for storage of games.

SSDs are the way to go. You will never want a normal HDD ever again.
All 5 of my drives in my PC are SSDs now (1.2tb total). Startup, file transfers, app load speeds, etc, is blazing fast. If you want even faster, try RAIDing two SSDs.

I'd say switching from a traditional HDD to an SSD will be the single most important upgrade you'll notice right away.