Modern SSD For Old Motherboard?

[Lord Solon]

Hi everyone,

I've been using tom's Hardware as a reference guide since the mid 2000's and it has solved countless problems and answered many questions over the years. It's a great site/community.

I have a reasonably old pc setup and I'm looking to get a SSD to breathe some extra life back into it. From what I've read a PCIe interface is always faster than using SATA however due to the age of my motherboard I know for sure that it doesn't have a M.2 slot. I don't want to use a SATA connection so I was thinking of getting a M.2 to PCIe adapter card and connecting it that way.

Again, due to the age of my motherboard I'm not sure if I will get superior speed this way compared to using SATA 3.

I'd like to get something along the lines of MyDigitalSSD bpx series or Samsung 960 EVO.

I want to use it as my boot and windows drive plus whatever games I can fit on it and use my old HDD for data storage.

Is this a viable idea?

My setup is,

Motherboard - Gigabyte 890fxa ud5 revision 2.0 with f6 BIOS
Processor - Phenom II 1090T BE @ 4Ghz
Cooling - Frostflow 240L
Case - Coolermaster Scout
RAM - 16Gb (4x4Gb) G.Skill Ripjaws F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL DDR 3 sticks
Graphics - AMD R9 290X
Storage - 1Tb Western Digital 7200rpm (from 2010)
PSU - Seasonic 850HT Active PFC F3 (from 2010)
Operating System - Windows 10

 

[Paul NZ]

I dont think it'll support the 960 since a BIOS update has to support NVME. And it's an NVME ssd.

And if the bios doesn't have the option you wont be able to add drivers for it, or boot from it

 

[USAFRet]

Just get a regular SATA drive.

No adapters to fiddle with, and it WILL work.

 

[Lord Solon]

After doing some more research it looks like if my mobo doesn't support NVMe then it's impossible to use a PCIe ssd as a boot drive which is what I want. The thing is that I've modded my case over the years and I no longer have a hard drive bay or floppy drive bay. Currently I sit my hard drive on top of my dvd drive with little to no room for anything else. Mounting the ssd into a pcie slot via an adapter would have solved my problem of placement.

So it's looking like a sata ssd is my only realistic option if I want to boot from it.

Overall I'd prefer not to use an external drive for booting windows.

Is the 850 EVO worth considering?

 

[USAFRet]

Is the 850 EVO worth considering?

Absolutely yes.
Or the Crucial MX300.

And with sticky velcro, mount that thing anywhere.

 

[Lord Solon]

After comparing them both it's a close call. I can get a 500Gb Crucial MX300 for $220 aus or a 500Gb 850 EVO for $260 aus. I'm thinking I just save the $40 and go for the MX300 but it is good for roughly 400Tb total data written compared to the 1.5 million hour life of the 850 EVO.

Is that difference worth $40?

Maybe I go for the EVO instead?

Also sticky velcro is a good idea haha.

 

[USAFRet]

After comparing them both it's a close call. I can get a 500Gb Crucial MX300 for $220 aus or a 500Gb 850 EVO for $260 aus. I'm thinking I just save the $40 and go for the MX300 but it is good for roughly 400Tb total data written compared to the 1.5 million hour life of the 850 EVO.

Is that difference worth $40?

Maybe I go for the EVO instead?

Also sticky velcro is a good idea haha.

Don't stress about that lifetime, either MTBF or TBW.
Either of these drives will be obsolete due to size long before they die from too many writes.

For an older system, the Crucial for less $$ would be my choice.

 

[Lord Solon]

After doing some more shopping around I was able to pickup a 500Gb MX300 for $185 from Tandy.com.au vs $230 or so for the 850 EVO. So yeah, decent enough savings from what I was prepared to pay.

Thanks for the advice USAFRet.