New SSD confusion!

esuhl

I'm thinking about getting an SSD for my PC. I've seen some amazingly fast SSDs that connect via PCIe, but I'm a bit confused as to whether I'd be able to boot from one, and what speeds I'd be able to achieve.

I want something really fast, but there's no point buying something faster than the PC can cope with! (Although, having said that, the PC is 6 years old already, so I might move the SSD to a faster motherboard in a few more years.)

The motherboard I have is the Asus P6T SE, and I have spare x4 and x16 PCIe v2.0 sockets. It has four SATA II sockets as well, although none are spare. I'd have to get a bigger hard drive to replace two existing drives to make room for a SATA SSD.

Anyway... am I right in thinking that I wouldn't be able to boot from a PCIe SSD as the motherboard (presumably?) isn't NVMe-aware?

Could I get a PCIe SSD and use the MBR on a mechanical hard drive to boot the SSD? Or should I just stick to a SATA II SSD?

I'll need at least 300GB (and probably can't afford more than 500GB) if anyone has any recommendations...?

enfield_freddy

ssd drives are sata 3 , but are compatable with sata 2 ,


there are several proggys , (free of charge) that will clone your drive , to ssd specs


you could remove an optical drive and use the cable to achieve this ,


you do not state the size of your other 2 drives , what are they? , as a large (1t) drive is reasonably priced those days

Fightsback

esuhl wrote: »

I'm thinking about getting an SSD for my PC. I've seen some amazingly fast SSDs that connect via PCIe, but I'm a bit confused as to whether I'd be able to boot from one, and what speeds I'd be able to achieve.

I want something really fast, but there's no point buying something faster than the PC can cope with! (Although, having said that, the PC is 6 years old already, so I might move the SSD to a faster motherboard in a few more years.)

The motherboard I have is the Asus P6T SE, and I have spare x4 and x16 PCIe v2.0 sockets. It has four SATA II sockets as well, although none are spare. I'd have to get a bigger hard drive to replace two existing drives to make room for a SATA SSD.

Anyway... am I right in thinking that I wouldn't be able to boot from a PCIe SSD as the motherboard (presumably?) isn't NVMe-aware?

Could I get a PCIe SSD and use the MBR on a mechanical hard drive to boot the SSD? Or should I just stick to a SATA II SSD?

I'll need at least 300GB (and probably can't afford more than 500GB) if anyone has any recommendations...?

See article here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/28/review_kingston_hyperx_predator_hhhl_480gb_pcie_ssd/

S0litaire

You can boot from those pcie ssd cards. The motherboard just sees it as another hard drive!

But they can be expensive!

Also might be best to do a clean install it going from a hard disk to an ssd as their are a few differences between how the OS handles the ssd compared to a hard disk.

enfield_freddy

I have a 128g M.2 card in my nuc 513 , as boot drive , they (sandisk etc) seem faster than an average ssd drive ,

Fightsback

S0litaire wrote: »

You can boot from those pcie ssd cards. The motherboard just sees it as another hard drive!

But they can be expensive!

Also might be best to do a clean install it going from a hard disk to an ssd as their are a few differences between how the OS handles the ssd compared to a hard disk.

Much easier to do the necessary tweaks than the rigmarole of a full install and a bit overkill. I'd agree if it were an OS upgrade.

enfield_freddy

agreed with fightsback , just clone the drive , (after cleaning and defragging)


mini tool partition (free) inc a setting for cloning from a NON SSD drive to a SSD drive , live whilst running windows

S0litaire

Fightsback wrote: »

Much easier to do the necessary tweaks than the rigmarole of a full install and a bit overkill. I'd agree if it were an OS upgrade.

In the past I've done the straight image between disk and ssd and even after the tweaks it just never ran right, had problems with trim, had to keep doing it manually as the settings never seemed to kick in!

But might just have been me! And i think a clean sweep is good every now and again...

esuhl

enfield_freddy wrote: »

you could remove an optical drive and use the cable to achieve this ,

Ah, the optical drive is connected via IDE (as is yet another hard drive!).

enfield_freddy wrote: »

you do not state the size of your other 2 drives , what are they? , as a large (1t) drive is reasonably priced those days

Well, it's not really important, but my current drive layout is as follows:

1TB SATA drive:
NTFS - Windows XP (100GB)
ext3 - Linux root (75GB)
NTFS - Windows 7 (250GB)
ext2 - Linux /boot (64MB)
ext3 - Linux /home (75GB)
NTFS - Data (420GB)
FAT32 - Data (12GB)
swap - Linux swap (512MB)

300GB SATA drive:
NTFS - Data (100GB)
NTFS - Music (25GB)
NTFS - Video (175GB)

60GB IDE drive:
NTFS - Data (60GB)

300GB SATA drive:
NTFS - Backup1 (300GB)

300GB SATA drive:
NTFS - Backup2 (300GB)

DVD+/-RW IDE drive

Fightsback wrote: »

See article here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/28/review_kingston_hyperx_predator_hhhl_480gb_pcie_ssd/

Exactly the kind of thing I was looking at! Will it take much of a speed hit if I stick it in a PCIe v2.0 slot instead of a v3.0 one?

Will I definitely be able to boot from it using my old motherboard?

S0litaire wrote: »

You can boot from those pcie ssd cards. The motherboard just sees it as another hard drive!

I just want to make absolutely sure, but... are you sure my old motherboard will be able to boot from it? How would my BIOS "see" the drive? What option would appear in the boot selection settings? (Not that I don't trust you -- I just want to make sure!)

Fightsback wrote: »

Much easier to do the necessary tweaks than the rigmarole of a full install and a bit overkill. I'd agree if it were an OS upgrade.

I currently run 3 OSes:

1. Windows XP for a few legacy apps (so easy enough to reinstall).
2. Windows 7 (which has become unfathomably bloated and needs a reinstall anyway). I might upgrade to Windows 10 on the HDD then use the Win10 ISO to create a clean installation on the SSD.
3. Arch Linux (which has been tweaked and customised and I definitely don't want to reinstall -- I'll move the partitions with a cloning app!)

Anyway, if I can boot from one of those PCIe cards, that definitely seems to be the way to go for blisteringly-fast performance.

I_have_spoken

I use one of these - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00J69VM8A - as my boot drive, it's recognised by the BIOS on start-up and boots Windows 7 64bit fine.

Get around 325MB/sec on write, 350MB/sec read by ATTO Benchmark

Stoke

Any SSD will improve your performance, even a cheap one. My point in the other thread, mechanical and software bottlenecks. Mechanical HDD are bottlenecked by physics, SSD's are much faster.

Use a SSD as primary, and a HDD as a secondary and you'll be laughing.