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I'm going to be upgrading my Dell Inspiron 530 (2.0 Ghz Intel Dual Core CPU, 3 GB RAM) to windows 7 soon, and rather than backup and reformat my existing drive, I'm planning on getting a 2nd drive to replace my current primary, and moving it to a secondary. Thus, this seems like an excellent time to get a solid-state drive, if its going to be worth it. As far as I can tell this machine has a SATA-I controller, and I'm unsure if I'll see a noticeable performance increase with an SSD without going to SATA-II.

So I have a three part question here given all that:

  1. Will spending the money on a SSD be worth it if hook it into a SATA-I controller?

  2. Is it reasonable to upgrade the controller on this machine to a SATA-II controller?

  3. Given that this PC is kind of old to begin with, am I better off performance wise to just stick with a faster HDD?

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  1. yes, Intel X-25 for performance or OCZ Vertex for value.

  2. yes, altough not a necessity, the controller costs only $20.

  3. no, the SSD will outperform even the fastest platter HDD.

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  • do you mean Intel X-25? as far as I can tell, IBM doesn't make SSD's
    – DrFredEdison
    Nov 4, 2009 at 20:27
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I would also look into the Seagate Momentus XT if you don't want to drop a tonne of money on a SSD.

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  • Didn't know they made hybrid drives. That's cool!
    – mpen
    Sep 30, 2010 at 7:25
  • I was thinking of picking one up to put into my 2 year old Acer to bring some more life into it.
    – brandon927
    Sep 30, 2010 at 7:27
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Spending on an SSD would definitely benefit; provided you rely too much on read/write operations like video editing, photoshop etc. read/writing large chunks of data would be beneficial..

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