Recommend SSD to speed up my PC

misterthrifty

Hi, my PC is getting older and slower so I want to add a SSD and transfer the OS over so it will be quicker to startup. As the PC is not recent I think it will need a SATA SSD, I have checked the size of the existing drive and it looks like the contents will fit on a 250gb drive.
I'm a bit bit out of my depth in choosing a suitable drive, there just seem to be lots of numbers! Can anybody recommend any good deals at the moment on a SSD that will do the trick?

TIA

pbartlett

Go onto Amazon and search for 250GB sata ssd,. This seems a reasonable one:

Crucial BX500 240 GB CT240BX500SSD1(Z)-Up to 540 MB/s (Internal SSD, 3D NAND, SATA, 2.5 Inch), Black : Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

neilmcl

pbartlett said:

Go onto Amazon and search for 250GB sata ssd,. This seems a reasonable one:

Crucial BX500 240 GB CT240BX500SSD1(Z)-Up to 540 MB/s (Internal SSD, 3D NAND, SATA, 2.5 Inch), Black : Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

Why, when you could spend just over a fiver more and get the MX500

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-MX500-CT250MX500SSD1-NAND-Internal/dp/B0781VSXBP/ref=sr_1_11

Carrot007

neilmcl said:

pbartlett said:

Go onto Amazon and search for 250GB sata ssd,. This seems a reasonable one:

Crucial BX500 240 GB CT240BX500SSD1(Z)-Up to 540 MB/s (Internal SSD, 3D NAND, SATA, 2.5 Inch), Black : Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

Why, when you could spend just over a fiver more and get the MX500

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-MX500-CT250MX500SSD1-NAND-Internal/dp/B0781VSXBP/ref=sr_1_11

I woukld say because it makes little difference in performace. You go sata, any, yes any SSD will be soo much better. £5 more for nothing? 10mb Hmmm.

Not that I would recomend under 500gb these days. But If you are gouing ~250 then whatever. Many people only use that much anyway.

Better? Yes. Worth it at that level? Doubt it exceppting very specific circumstances!

[Deleted User]

I second the Crucial MX500 - have got 3 of the 500GB models in use in different laptops in my house - the oldest is 3 years old and still going strong after 8,000 hours usage and 27TB written.

There is a pretty big difference in performance compared to the BX500 so it is well worth the extra £5 - oh and a 5 year warranty vs 3 years.

https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Crucial-MX500-250GB-vs-Crucial-BX500-240GB/3951vsm578496

When you say the contents will fit on a 240GB drive - how full will it be? SSD's suffer a drop in write performance when they get full, ideally keep them below 80% full, a bigger drive might give you that buffer.

getmore4less

Loads of options and prices fluctuate a lot.



Crucial is my starting  choice then have a quick look at alternatives but the savings tend to be minimal.

I check here first(they have reductions fairly regularly)
https://uk.crucial.com/catalog/ssd/mx500
https://uk.crucial.com/catalog/ssd/bx500

also HUKD for any SSD or specific
https://www.hotukdeals.com/search?q=Mx500


then amazon and use the camel to check price history.
https://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0786QNS9B




If you keep the old drive it can carry much of what you have already as a lot will probably be rarely used data.

I stuck the OS and anything I use daily on the SSD(80GB) and the rest stayed on the old drive(160GB).

Some days the old drive never fires up during use.

coffeehound

Deleted_User said:

There is a pretty big difference in performance compared to the BX500 so it is well worth the extra £5 

Nit-picking, but would an older PC be capable of taking up the higher performance?

ann_droid

ComputerActive recommend.......................
https://uk.crucial.com/ssd/mx500/ct500mx500ssd1

Well who actually cares.

Step 1 
Get the Workshop Manual for the PC if you can.
The motherboard may take a Samsung 970 EVO plus 500Gb @£78
OR even better...
Crucial MX500 from https://uk.crucial.com/ssd/mx500/ct500mx500ssd1 @£60

[Deleted User]

coffeehound said:

Deleted_User said:

There is a pretty big difference in performance compared to the BX500 so it is well worth the extra £5 

Nit-picking, but would an older PC be capable of taking up the higher performance?

Fair question, personally I think yes it will because the biggest difference in performance stats are in the slower random / read write benchmarks, not the peak transfer rates.

Comparing the two disks - peak read / write for sequential is up in the 400-500 MB/s with a slight different of about 5% or less between the drives - certainly won't be noticeable and if the PC is really old with SATA II (3Gb/s) then it will bottleneck well before the top end of the drive performance so not worth the difference.

But the 4K mixed random read / writes for example increase from 11MB/s to 45MB/s between the two models which is well within the hardware capabilities of an older PC and more akin to real-life usage. Compared to a spinning HDD which would be around 1-2MB/s for similar tests then both are a huge improvement and really noticeable - this is the use case where SSD's show their most benefit - so a 10x or 40x difference to a HDD is worthy of an extra £5 in my mind.

The 4K mixed random read / writes is typical of the usage that occurs on a system drive when booting the PC, opening applications and using the page file if short of memory so I'd say you would find a benefit.

GDB2222

The OP has not said what his old PC is, and that does matter. 

I replaced the HDD on my ancient C2D PC with an SSD, and it transformed the performance.

I did the same on my rather newer laptop with an Atom processor, and it made hardly any difference. I assume that the processor is the bottleneck. 

coffeehound

Tallmansix, interesting, thanks.