Storage, Drives & Media

[darth_fester]

Hello all,

I'd like to to replace my Windows 7 boot partition HD with a SSD to my XPS 435MT. I believe the XPS 435MT maximally supports SATA-2 natively.

Other than the SSD and cabling, what do I need to upgrade the XPS to support SATA-3's speed of 6Gb/s? Is it even possible?

Kind thanks,

Daniel

[jackshack · Accepted solution]

The XPS 435MT SATA interface is limited to 3 GB/sec by its hardware, but it will still accept drives that are capable of 6 GB/sec.  The higher, 6 GB/sec, interface speed requires the Sandy Bridge architecture that became available with the XPS 8300.

[darth_fester]

Thank you kindly.

[jackshack]

You're very welcome.  Best of luck to you.

[Red Bon]

How do you tranfer your windows 7 to SSD? i want to do such work too.

[AndyWilt]

What if he simply adds an additional card such as StarTech 2 Port SATA 3 PCI Express Controller Card

this should in theory all him to use the faster speed. What are your thoughts?

[darth_fester]

I was going to perform a fresh install from DVD; others may have a faster approach

[darth_fester]

I did pretty much that. I added an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9240-4i card because it supports RAID10 and installed 4 OCZ Vertex 3 120GB drives. Benchmarking, I went from ~100MB/s to ~850MB/s.