Does this motherboard support SSDs?

[FlyerDragon]

Hi everybody,
my father's birthday is approaching and I'd like to give him an SSD for his super slow booting pc. It's a 4 years old computer and was anyway a budget build, because he just uses it for browsing and some office work, no gaming no rendering. So here's the question: will it support a Samsung 120GB EVO SSD without huge bottlenecks?

The motherboard is this one:
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M4A87TDUSB3/specifications/
SB850 is kinda unknown to me as a storage controller.

I've never updated a bios so I would happily avoid to do that, will it limit the performance?

Some other details on the build:
AMD Phenom II X4 955
LC-Power LC6550GP2
DDR3 Kingstone HyperX 2x2GB
Western Digital Caviar Green 500GB
Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB
Asus HD 4350 Fanless

Thanks in advance!

 

[i7Baby]

Yes - it has sata 6gbs port. Thats where you plug a SSD into.

 

[Paul NZ]

Yup its got SATA 3 ports So will support SATA 2 or 3 SD's

6 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), white

Altho lower capacity SSDS will have lower cache. So maybe slower. If you can afford it, it maybe / would be better if you get a 250+

Flashing a BIOS is easy. Since it supports ez flash, all you have to do is download the BIOS update extract it to a flash drive. Plug it in.

Reboot. Go into the BIOS. Go to ez flash. Point it to to the folder with the BIOS. Load it. Wait for it to finish. Thats it

 

[rhysiam]

Yeah, that'll work just fine, though you'll have to either migrate the OS (maybe use Samsung's software) or rebuild the OS from scratch (which I'd recommend if you have the OS key and are prepared to take the time with him to put his programs back on and reconfigure things the way he likes them).

It may not benchmark the same as a SSD on an intel controller, but it'll still be night and day difference performance wise.

Maybe better to avoid that drive at the moment though, Samsung have acknowledged a pretty bad read performance issue on stagnant data: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8550/samsung-acknowledges-the-ssd-840-evo-read-performance-bug-fix-is-on-the-way
The Crucial MX100 is a cheaper option anyway, and still plenty fast and reliable.

 

[rhysiam]

Yup its got SATA 3 ports So will support SATA 2 or 3 SD's

6 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), white

Altho lower capacity SSDS will have lower cache. So maybe slower. If you can afford it, it maybe / would be better if you get a 250+

Given the use-case of the drive - single user doing standard Office/Internet work, with respect, I'd find it hard to justify spending up on a larger capacity drive just for performance. It's going to be plenty fast IMHO.

 

[Paul NZ]

Up to you but you'll find out. It depends what the newer BIOS does, and what it fixes (if anything)

 

[sizzling]

Sounds like a candidate for an SSHD if you want to keep things simple and cheap http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-hard-drives/solid-state-hybrid/desktop-solid-state-hybrid-drive/