Could An SSD Be The Best Upgrade For Your Old PC?

[ianj14]

Last year I upgraded the HDD in my 'old' Core 2 Quad system to an Intel x25-m 160GB SSD and it made more than a significant difference to the Windows 7 load time. Despite some glitches with the drive that have meant a couple of complete wipes and restores from a clone copy during that time to now, I would never go back to an HDD. For the record, the Mobo is an old Asus P5W64 WS from 2006, with 8GB memory DDR2 memory running at PC5300, a Q9770 processor slightly overclocked at 3.3GHz, and two graphics cards, an old X1900 and an old GeForce 8800, CPU and Graphics water cooled. While it would never break any records, it runs very sweetly and is more than able to cope with any of the business loads I put on it, like Excel number crunching, video re-encoding, audio encoding, SETI processing, graphics rendering, etc. I don't doubt for a second though that it would be useless in modern gaming. But that's not what it's for.

 

[EnderWiggin]

I upgraded my gf's old Toshiba laptop with a Pentium Dual Core T2060 (1.60 GHz) and 2 GB of RAM with an Intel X-25M SSD drive and Windows 7, and wow, what a difference it made to the boot-up time and the application start-ups; Adobe Photoshop just opens, no splash-screen. Yes it cost me $200 at the time for 80GB but the performance difference was enough to justify not buying a new laptop for her.

 

[Guest]

Anyone know of a relatively painless way to add an SSD boot drive to an older XP system without reinstalling the OS?

I currently have a 320GB SATA boot drive that is half full.
I have a 32GB SSD that I would like to transfer the existing OS environment to , which should easily fit.
I know you can redirect program files and the desktop to use a drive other than C:\ after the fact, but is there a way to create a Ghost-like image while ignoring certain folders, such that you can restore it to the SSD and create a new boot drive?

 

[memadmax]

Well, its like they say, a computer is as fast as its slowest part. Back in the old days, that was the floppy, then the IDE drive, now it's the mass storage device like the SATA/SSD.

Of course a SSD is gonna speed up an older system. You're speeding up the slowest part(unless you want to get virtuous and say its the DVD player lol). This is a great upgrade if you already are capped on your processor and RAM like the fastest, highest capacity each, along with the fastest mobo available for the processor socket series... In short you gotta look at your older system first. If ur low on RAM add that FIRST before an SSD. If you are running the slowest proc for your socket, certainly upgrade that first. Video card is an issue as well....

 

[kal326]

[citation][nom]AnUnusedUsername[/nom]I've been considering buying a SSD for an older laptop I have, as basically nothing else is replaceable. It's a moderately old system with a Core 2 duo, old but not as old as some in the article. The major issue that's deterring me is whether or not SATA 1.0 would allow for much performance increase from an SSD. All of the systems in the article support at least SATA 2.0, which I don't think was all that common in laptops, even in 2007. The question I have is whether a SATA 1 connection is fast enough for an SSD to have any noticeable benefit. It's obvious the SSD would be faster, but would the connection mean I'm effectively limited to HDD-level performance anyway?[/citation]
From my personal experience with a Lenovo R61 replacing a regular Seagate 7200rpm 500GB with a Kingston V100 128GB SSD the laptop was the bottleneck. The R61 is based off the mobile Intel P965 for sure and I think the ICH7. The SSD drive should have had max sustained transfers of 250MB/s in reality the best I could get benchmarking the drive was around 117MB/s for sustained transfer. The Seagate drive got around 67MB/s. I put the drive in a USB3 enclosure and got up in the 200MB/s range so I know the drive was not the issue. Overall the drive felt faster during day to day tasks and boot up, but some performance wasn't much better than the 500GB drive I already had and I was looking about 3/4 of my storage space. So I decided to return the drive since the machine I had it in couldn't use it to its full potential and I already had a large fast drive with built into laptop shock protection.

 

[compuservant]

Interesting, I did the same with an old Dell SC420 that I had maxed out the memory (4 GB) put in a 16X PCI-E card into a modded PCI-E 8X slot. I found a cheap Kinsteon SSD NOW (not the more recent ones) with a transfer kit that I got for $80 for a 64 GB drive. It won't touch a new core i7-2600k system with any kind of quality graphics card but it is no slouch. It will let me wait until light peak does or does not become main stream (oh yeah, I added an USB 3.0 card for $29), SATA 6GB/s come down dramatically in price and get bigger, and a couple bridges past Ivy (I think they should call it it Jeff). Not too bad for $500-$600 considering $300 or so was spent on the original dell server (I have XP Pro running on it.)

 

[csiguy]

I'm surprised that no one picked up on the big flaw in this article -- Windows 7 was used on all of the systems.
Chances are that the majority of people with systems that date around ~2005-2007 are running XP or Vista.
So... no OS Trim support. You'll either have to spend an additional $100 for a copy of Windows 7 along with the SSD cost, or purchase an SSD with good GC.

 

[Guest]

"if you're spending most of your time in office productivity apps, browsing the Internet, or watching video/listening to music, an older Core 2 setup is still respectable" What is this nonsense? My core 2 setup still spanks just about every application I throw at it. That line makes the core 2 sound like the atom.

 

[berk98]

Well-written article.

However, I am not too happy about their use of the Pentium 4. It is quite dated and even this article mentioned the entire system would be worth replacing. I would much rather have seen the Pentium D, for two reasons. It would expose the difference between it and the Core 2 (which on the surface seem somewhat similar), and because I know people who still use the Pentium D, whereas I know nobody with a Pentium 4.

I also would like to have seen some more real-world tests. When I use my computer, I don't just run PCMark, I run Firefox, Adobe Premiere CS4, Audacity, MS Office, and various games such as Portal 2. I realize an SSD will make a difference in nearly every respect, but PCMark does a bad job of putting it into perspective. PCMark could say that Audacity runs twice as well on an SSD, but it could just that mean a particular effect takes 3.5 seconds to load instead of 4 seconds, which isn't as impressive.

 

[berk98]

[citation][nom]csiguy[/nom]I'm surprised that no one picked up on the big flaw in this article -- Windows 7 was used on all of the systems.Chances are that the majority of people with systems that date around ~2005-2007 are running XP or Vista.So... no OS Trim support. You'll either have to spend an additional $100 for a copy of Windows 7 along with the SSD cost, or purchase an SSD with good GC.[/citation]

Great comment. However I still must add that Windows 7 won't run as well as XP on older machines from 05-07. Even if an SSD adds a good deal of performance, the addition of Windows 7 could bring you right back to where you started. It seems like the cost of the SSD + the cost of a Windows 7 upgrade could be better spent on more ram, better graphics, or (if it predates the Core 2) a newer CPU/Motherboard.

 

[Guest]

The sad part is that on a older computer once the OS is booted and a program is opened. The speed of the computer generally is with the CPU, graphics and RAM speed. I guess if you constantly shut down and start up your computer the SSD is going to be faster. I am skeptical as too why you would spend that much on a SSD and not upgrade a CPU or a graphics card or even add RAM ?

 

[Guest]

I recently put some Corsair Force SSDs in a few new Dell Inspirons I bought to run some lab instruments. Unfortunately, Dell seems to have removed from the bios AHCI and, after doing a little more research, most of their inspiron computers have been that way for several years. So, be sure you have a computer that AHCI can be enabled on or your upside becomes a bit more limited.

 

[youssef 2010]

That's a great idea for a review. I,for one, was slightly hesitant to buy and SSD and now, I know were $200 of my salary will go.

 

[Guest]

A good article, but another significant factor that was overlooked was the effort required to perform each type of upgrade. RAM is the easiest: open the case plug it in, that's it - no software to re-install, or configurations to change. The whole thing can be done in 10 minutes. Most processor upgrades are equally easy (assuming the motherboard remains the same). Graphics cards are next easiest, since they also require driver updates. But any kind of hard drive upgrade requires significantly more effort and downtime, either while copying thousands of files to the new hard drive or performing complete re-installs of the OS and applications. That can take hours (or even days) - time which may never be recovered with a few seconds saved here in boot-up times, and there in application "snapiness".

 

[digirati]

To quote you: "If you're just browsing the Internet, using social media, watching video, communicating over Skype, or word processing, a five-year-old Core 2 Duo still probably feels like a snappy-enough system."

HORSECRAP!!!! My wife browses the Internet, uses social media, watches YouTube videos etc., etc. She's using an IBM (not a Lenovo, an IBM) ThinkPad with a Pentium3 1GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM and a 40GB HDD. And that's STILL more machine than she puts to use!

If that's all you're doing with your PC, you don't need anything over a Pentium 2 300 and 128 MB RAM. As "ancient" as you're trying to make a Core2 Duo sound, it's still overkill for email.

 

[magnus909]

I think that the conclusion that the p4 users shouldn't upgrade to an ssd is completely wrong.
Yes, if you are some type of power user.
But if you are only the light type of user they are talking about then all the tests that didn't tax the cpu showed that the system with the p4 was just as fast (or even the fastest strangely enough) as all the other systems.
Only a few results where the cpu was involved showed a difference.

In fact, the p4 system was the system that benefited the most since they mechanical harddrive in it was also the slowest.
If a person just are doing light stuff then it makes all the sense in the world to just buy an SSD insted of upgrading the whole system.
If a person uses the pc for more processor intensive tasks he would have upgraded it years ago anyway!

 

[brucek2]

If you're about to spend money to upgrade, vs. replace, an older system, there's one more reason why the SSD is a great choice: it is very likely to carry over to your future system(s), whereas RAM, CPU, mobo may not.

You're eventually going to buy a completely new system. When you do, that new system is probably still going to have a SATA port, and this SSD will still be valuable for something. Meanwhile, though, the CPU socket, memory specifications, etc may be such that they are incompatible with the RAM and CPU you would have bought as a temporary upgrade.

 

[dioxholster]

loading times arent really a problem I care to address. so what can ssd do for me other than that?

 

[razor512]

totally agree, if you are testing old computers then test with windows xp. If you have a old system, you are not going to spend $240 getting a SSD and a copy of windows 7, for that price you are better off just spending a little more and building a new system that will be 5 times faster (greatly improving your cost to performance ratio).

 

[Guest]

Having bought a ssd, how do you actually secure the thing in your case.

Surely double sided tape isn't an option. Are there commercial devices on offer? Is cooling an issue (not for the case - but the ssd itself).

Given that these will be old cases, further investigation of this topic might be really valuable for readers.

 

[clonazepam]

Here'd be a great real world test of the SSDs. Download large linux distros over torrent files. Download load a bunch to SSD and others of the same filesize to a sata I, II, III drive and more to an IDE drive.

Once they complete. Stop them, and time how long it takes to complete the "Force Re-Check" on the file. It feels near instand on SSDs

And its just amazing enough people will get more excited about SSDs and hopefully buy-in on the technology with prices be damned. Please update this test scenario with the suggestions I provided. I love Tom's Hardware, and I would be so incredibly honored, with or without any nod my way.

 

[ianj14]

[citation][nom]dioxholster[/nom]loading times arent really a problem I care to address. so what can ssd do for me other than that?[/citation]

Presuming the use of an SSD as OS and program drive:

Any individual program starting up will be much faster, as will any load of configuration files during the program's running.
Loading of data files into a program will be faster (as long as the data files are stored on an SSD - if stored on HDD then, though they will be faster, it won't be by anything like as much).
Saving files to disk will be somewhat faster (with the more recent SSDs at any rate).
Anti-virus and other types of disk scan will be considerably faster.
Searches (whether indexed or otherwise) will be considerably faster.
Indexing will be considerably faster.


horbs: Re mounting an SSD, there are 2.5 to 3.5 inch adapter mounts, have been for 'centuries'. Some SSDs even come with them supplied.

 

[shin0bi272]

I put an ocz vertex 2 in my i7 920 with 6gb of ram on an asus p6t deluxe v2, and it was definitely NOT worth the upgrade. Sure my game's load times from save games are faster (mass effect loads in 5 seconds vs 15 on an echs bhocs 360), and windows loads a little faster than my velociraptor that the ssd replaced, but its not like some super fast amazing machine now. The rig only plays games so any sort of "creativity" work is superfluous to its operation. The price : performance ratio is just way off still. Wait till they come down to under a dollar a gig before you buy one unless you are putting it in a p4 to save it from the scrap heap because you just cant let the old girl die.

 

[captaincharisma]

how much is reasonable? A 64GB Crucial M4 is $105... that's pretty damn reasonable to me. For that kind of money you could get a low-end mobo, an Athlon X4, or 16GB of DDR3. Upgrades don't get much more reasonable than that. But if you already have a decent, if older system, installing an SSD will make it feel like a brand new system should for the least amount of money.

if you thnk $105.00 is reasonable for a 64GB HDD whether it is SSD or not you must be one of the apple sheep. its freakin 64GB!!!! on a PC today anyone could fill that up in a few months. and this is just when using it as a drive for windows and its programs. heck a windows drive for me i would need at least 120GB and those are still in the high hundred, $200 plus for an SSD drive and still not worth it when i could go get a 120GB magnetic HDD for under 50 bucks

 

[MrBig55]

What about converting video files between formats, or converting an .avi file to a dvd-video, or even a VIDEO_TS folder to a dvd-video? What about converting an audio album to .mp3 or .ogg format? Or compressing Gigabytes of data for the sake of making lot smaller .7z or .rar files? I mean what about real-world tasks...