Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, Steel
kumori wrote:The only other difficulty I see is that an SSD is 2.5" while your current HDD is 3.5". Therefore, an SSD will be too small to fit in the bracket meant for the harddrive. You will need to secure it by other means, possibly velcro or similar. Because SSDs don't have moving parts, it is less necessary to worry about how they are installed inside of a case.
Captain Ned wrote:If, like me, you're not quite that ghetto, just get something like this. As bthylafh notes, some SSDs include this in the box (they're usually marketed as "retail" or "upgrade" SKUs rather than OEM or "bare" drives).EDIT: As for mounting SSDs in remote corners of a box, a hot-glue gun will be your friend.
DancinJack wrote:I think this is the pick of the litter right now.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148820
Captain Ned wrote:Dug around some and your motherboard is SATA 2.0 (300MB/sec).
DancinJack wrote:Captain Ned wrote:FWIW, I have a SATA II mobo and I don't think I miss the extra speed. A SSD pushing ~300MB/s is still really, really fast. Especially compared to a magnetic, spinning HDD.Dug around some and your motherboard is SATA 2.0 (300MB/sec).
scott784 wrote:Great feedback guys. Glad to hear I've got SATA 2 (and not older than that). And I think that Crucial SSD looks like a good one that I might order. Btw, dumb question here, but I'll ask anyway. Are the pin connectors the same on my old traditional HDD versus what I would have on a new SSD? I am assuming yes. But you know what they say about assuming
Captain Ned wrote:DancinJack wrote:Captain Ned wrote:Dug around some and your motherboard is SATA 2.0 (300MB/sec).
FWIW, I have a SATA II mobo and I don't think I miss the extra speed. A SSD pushing ~300MB/s is still really, really fast. Especially compared to a magnetic, spinning HDD.
Fully agreed. I was just advocating that dropping long green on the fastest possible SSD wasn't such a good idea on SATA 2.0 unless there was another evolutionary build coming soon.
Captain Ned wrote:DancinJack wrote:Captain Ned wrote:FWIW, I have a SATA II mobo and I don't think I miss the extra speed. A SSD pushing ~300MB/s is still really, really fast. Especially compared to a magnetic, spinning HDD.Dug around some and your motherboard is SATA 2.0 (300MB/sec).
Fully agreed. I was just advocating that dropping long green on the fastest possible SSD wasn't such a good idea on SATA 2.0 unless there was another evolutionary build coming soon.
Flying Fox wrote:Actually, knowing that it is SATA II is a good thing. Remember some early SATA I implementations where if an SATA II device was plugged in it was not quite compatible? Thus we had jumpers on HDDs back then to force SATA I operation? When SSDs burst onto the scene this problem has largely gone away, but we are talking older hardware here. So knowing that the motherboard supports native SATA II should ensure this issue to be not applicable. This should be good.
Captain Ned wrote:Whoa, talk about a time warp. Further digging through your service manual:
ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/all-products ... _en-us.pdf
shows no PATA connectors, but does show that you've got the oddball BTX form factor. BTX was pushed by Intel back then as a way to suck more air through the case to keep the P4s it was designed for from reaching meltdown temps. Once P4 died, BTX followed it.
DancinJack wrote:Your BIOS mode should either be AHCI or RAID. Sometimes there is no AHCI setting, so RAID is fine. You just don't want IDE.
And honestly man, you don't even need to mount the SSD. Just set it somewhere in the case it's not gonna go tumbling around if you bump the case with your knee or something.
Mentawl wrote:One of these is pretty nice for converting a 2.5" drive into a standard-form-factor 3.5" format:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817994064
I use a coupl've them in two of my systems (older Antec cases with only bottom-screw-hole HDD mounts) and they work great . Nice solid mechanism and good airflow.
DancinJack wrote:It's definitely the best SSD deal going on right now. You'll be very happy.
xgsound wrote:Here is what I recently added to my 2006 SATA II AMD X2 build. It comes with a 2.5 inch tray adapter and sata cable for $169 last I checked. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820167177 I was tempted with the crucial SSDs, but reviews said it has trouble with my old AMD south bridge. The SSD improved the snappiness a lot, even without AHCI.
You may also find Aomei Partition manager (*free*) useful if you want to image your hard drive to the SSD. It is designed to image to a smaller SSD and worked fine and quickly for me! http://www.disk-partition.com/download-home.html
Check BIOS to see if AHCI is selected for the current HD. This is highly desired (not required) for the SSD. If not, use the reg fixit mod before changing the setting to AHCI or it will not boot into windows. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976
Jim
scott784 wrote:Those are the only choices in the BIOS. The factory default setting is Raid 'On'. And that's how it's still set in the BIOS. Please let me know if you think I should change it when I get the new SSD. Obviously, I know I can't change it right now or my current configuration would not boot to Win 7. But it would be easy enough to switch right before reinstalling Windows on the new drive.
DancinJack wrote:Yeah, just leave it to RAID on and install Windows fresh, if that's still your plan. Should work great. You will be pretty amazed how fast Windows installs on a SSD vs HDD.