Will an SSHD Reach Optimal Speeds on an Inspiron 620?

Understood, thanks. I'll settle for a new HDD then.

I run SSDs just fine on my two Inspiron 620s.  Key to this is two fold.  First I use the Samsung Data Migration software so that it gets the SSD on the correct boundaries.  Next I turn off HD optimization in Optimize and defragment drives under Tools in Properties of drive.

Not full SSD speed, but once you try this you will never tolerate HDD again.

David

@lambdapro2 So I would be better off using an SSD rather than buying a new HDD, even with the reduced speeds taken into account? I'll see if I can install one then; I happen to have a 2TB Crucial MX500 lying around, but never got around to installing it. I don't know where to start lol.

@lambdapro2 I took your advice and ordered a mounting kit. Getting the SSD mounted and installed was a bit tricky, but I eventually figured it out. After cloning my HDD's files to my SSD, it runs beautifully. The SSD boots up the OS and programs so much faster. :')

Not supporting in AHCI means that Trim is not supported.AHCI is required for native TRIM support in Windows

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000016148/memory-and-storage.html?wapkw=trim

It also means that indexing, swap, and defrag will write the drive to death in short order.

Pre fetch, superfetch, hibernate, indexing, defrag, etc should be OFF for an SSD with limited number of writes.

Due to an effect known as write amplification, when small 512-byte
sector is written to SSD, entire eraseblock (typically 32x larger)
gets erased and rewritten.

“optimizing” Windows for an SSD involves reducing the amount of writes to the SSD.
That’s because each cell of flash memory on the drive only has a limited number
of writes before it can’t be written to anymore.

Disable swap file

Swapping reduces SSD lifetime greatly.

No paging file

Disable System Restore

Theoretically, System Restore feature is to make sure that software installations,
drivers, and other updates can be rolled back.

In practice, it never works that way and just wasting disk space and I/O.

My Computer -> Properties -> System Restore

Disable Updating of File Last Access Time

Each time you read any file, Windows updates its attributes (last access time in particular).
Such updates generate a lot of useless disk writes.

Disable Windows Prefetch

Windows Prefetch is indended to speed up loading of applications. It writes a copy of which DLLs and data files each application tend to read each time on startup and makes them sequental on disk in its Windows Prefetcher Cache.

Disable disk defragmentation and background moving of frequently accessed files to the start of disk

Because random read time on SSD is the same as linear read time, defragmentation is damaging for SSD and reduces its life.

@speedstep Ok, I did everything you said and restarted my computer. Will this improve my SSD's lifespan by a significant amount? Won't changing these settings lower my SSD's speed even further?

The number of reads is not the issue.

The number of WRITES is limited.

You can literally write a drive to death in a few hours.

Especially if logging says keep for 2 weeks and you get an error in the system log thats silent that happens every second or so which is 86,400 writes to the error log per day.

No Idea what you mean by making performance worse.

prefetch is done after boot so there isn't a good justification for writing these over and over.

SSD's improve boot times but they don't speed up apps because once they are loaded the SSD isn't used as often for reads.