SSD on an older motherboard

fcogburn · 09 Mar 2012

Good morning or afternoon as the case may be,

I am fairly new to this forum so if this has been asked before please forgive. I have some experience with computers but haven't built one in about 4 years, at which time I built several for members of my family and myself. I had a PowerMac back many years ago. I was told by the Mac community then, that I would not be able to put a second hard drive in it, but being dumb and dangerous, I tried it, and it worked like a charm! I never tried putting the OS on it (MacOS 7.5 I believe it was), but I used it for every other thing. That being said, I ask now if I can use a a SSD on this motherboard (Asus P5N SLI SE Deluxe)? I had Windows XP Pro on it and went from there to Vista Home Premium 64bit, to Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit, which is what I'm running now (best Windows OS yet!). I've read that it has to be ACHI compliant but I can see nothing about that in the BIOS. This computer is running Windows 7 beautifully and whatever else has been said about it, it does definitely boot faster than Vista. Sorry for rambling, I am just an old retired coot that wants to mess around inside this thing again! As I said I know just enough to be dangerous!
Bottom line, can I use an SSD in this computer? Thanks for any responses, Frank

panais · 09 Mar 2012

Hi and welcome to SF :)

"Normally" yes you can.

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Int...SLI_SE_Deluxe/

Just physically remove any other hard disks,plug the ssd in sata 0 and install the windows 7.

You dont need to do anything just plug and install.

If your motherboard\bios doesn't has an ahci mode dont bother.

I dont know if by updating the bios if you will get the ahci mode.

bobkn · 09 Mar 2012

SSDs work differently than spinners in that when data has been written, it must be cleared before it can be written again. That causes writing times to increase after the drive has been used for a while.

Windows 7 supports the TRIM function, which does that drive clearing in the background. It requires that the drive be accessed in AHCI mode. I doubt that's available on your motherboard, with an nVidia chipset.

That said, you can still use an SSD. I've got one in a laptop PC that's a few years old, with a mobile nVidia chipset and AMD CPU. I've never run a "garbage collection" utility on it. If the write performance has degraded, it's still better than a spinner.

Note that some performance freaks run a pair of SSDs in RAID 0. The RAID drivers don't yet support TRIM.

I'd advise against investing much money in a system with a P5N SLI SE Deluxe motherboard. However, if you wish to play, SSD prices have come down so that it's possible to acquire a 115 to 128GB drive for not much over $100US. There are some cheapish high-performance models available, if you're prepared to risk using a Sandforce 228X controller. (I have two such drives. No problems.)

fcogburn · 09 Mar 2012

Thanks for the response. I had sort of presumed that this was the case, (already ordered a 120g drive). Prolly should not have spent the money but just couldn't resist and if I build a new one sometime soon I can use it then or put in the wife's machine. Thanks again,

Frank

panais · 09 Mar 2012

You are welcome