Worth Putting An Ssd In An Old Pc As Boot Drive?

[goldenfleece 11]

I am using an old desktop with 4gb ram running Windows 10. It has a small 160gb hard drive, and generally runs OK for an old machine. But is it worth popping in an SSD and using it as the boot drive with Windows?  Would this make any real speed difference in an old desktop, or would the 4gb ram still be a bottleneck for multi tasking? I can't add any more RAM on this old machine, it's maxed at 4gb. But given the HDD is about 10 years old and probably not very fast with virtual memory, would an SSD improve anything at all overall? 

 

It's a desktop from 2010, used only as a radio station play out server, and it copes OK.. just!  From time to time it does lag if you try and open more than one tab in Chrome or do anything else while it's running the radio encoding software and apps,which tends to be quite CPU intensive. 

[zach 234]

I use an SSD no matter what the age of the PC, as long as it has SATA (Obviously)

 

It will run at the speed of the SATA port of the PC. I have never seen one even come close the the slow speeds of a mechanical, and at about £25 for a basic one, it's worth it IMO.

 

I could go into a lot of geek speak but no point, they ARE faster.

[Thirsty Relic 214]

59 minutes ago, zach said:

I use an SSD no matter what the age of the PC, as long as it has SATA (Obviously)

 

It will run at the speed of the SATA port of the PC. I have never seen one even come close the the slow speeds of a mechanical, and at about £25 for a basic one, it's worth it IMO.

 

I could go into a lot of geek speak but no point, they ARE faster.

Yes, fully back what Zach says, as long as you have backed everything up first, and know what you are doing.  If you can't satisfy these two points, you risk losing all your data.

[goldenfleece 11]

Can you recommend any FREE Windows software that will make a boot clone of an existing boot C drive?   Don't really want to re-install Windows 10 and set everything up again on what is a relatively slow old machine.  A lot of software on it for the radio server, most of it I don't think I have the set-up files for.  I will keep the current mechanical boot drive as the back-up during the switchover, just in case it doesn't work as planned.  

Of course the SSD does not address the problem of limited and slow old RAM on this machine, but I guess any 'virtual memory' will be running much faster than a mechanical drive? 

[apelike 10]

I can recommend this mainly as its the only one I use!

 

https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

 

And if you need a fairy decent SSD this may suit you:

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-WDS240G2G0A-Internal-Green/dp/B076Y374ZH/ref=sr_1_17?dchild=1&keywords=250gb%2Bssd&qid=1598802726&sr=8-17&th=1

 

Be wary of some of the cheap SSD's you may see around though.

 

Basically...  install the SSD as normal then initialise and format it using Windows 10 disk manager and give it a name, this will then show up in windows as another drive so take note of the drive letter/name. Use the software to clone the boot drive normally C drive to the new drive. Shutdown and restart but now enter the bios first and change the boot order in it for the new drive to boot from. Don't do anything to the old drive until you are satisfied it is booting from the new drive first.

 

If you are not sure on how to backup just ask here as there are plenty here that will help you out.

 

**** Forgot one thing, you may need an adaptor bracket for it as mechanical drives in a PC were normally 3.5" and SSD drives are 2.5"

Edited August 30, 2020 by apelike

[alankearn 10]

13 hours ago, apelike said:

I can recommend this mainly as its the only one I use!

 

https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

 

And if you need a fairy decent SSD this may suit you:

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-WDS240G2G0A-Internal-Green/dp/B076Y374ZH/ref=sr_1_17?dchild=1&keywords=250gb%2Bssd&qid=1598802726&sr=8-17&th=1

 

Be wary of some of the cheap SSD's you may see around though.

 

Basically...  install the SSD as normal then initialise and format it using Windows 10 disk manager and give it a name, this will then show up in windows as another drive so take note of the drive letter/name. Use the software to clone the boot drive normally C drive to the new drive. Shutdown and restart but now enter the bios first and change the boot order in it for the new drive to boot from. Don't do anything to the old drive until you are satisfied it is booting from the new drive first.

 

If you are not sure on how to backup just ask here as there are plenty here that will help you out.

 

**** Forgot one thing, you may need an adaptor bracket for it as mechanical drives in a PC were normally 3.5" and SSD drives are 2.5"

Alternative to a bracket is a piece of velcro this would be plenty strong enough to secure the SSD to the side of a computer.

The SSDs are almost light enough to fasten them to the side of the computer with a piece of chewing gum

[zach 234]

I would just clone the old HDD with something like Macrium Reflect Free - there are others that are free.

 

With a clone, you won't have to reinstall the OS and your radio server etc. Keep the old drive safe. I do things slightly different from above. I clone the drive then shutdown and unplug. Swap out the old HDD for the SSD using the same SATA cable. If it's all done right, you won't see any change, it should just boot up with everything as it was. The end result is the same, just no need to go into the BIOS.

 

As for fixings, I've use both the bracket and velcro...both work.