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SSD upgrade in older E521 Athlon
Greetings,
I have an older E521, Athlon 64 3800+ (2.4GHz, 512K) with 4 GB DDR2 SDRAM. Svc Tag: Service tag removed per privacy policy>
Can I put a new SSD drive as my boot disk, running all my applications from that, and then use the existing HDD for my Users data storage? My configuration shows I that I have SATA 300, but I'm unsure of how that compares to the SATA II or SATA III. Any assistance will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Mike
ejn63
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August 26th, 2012 11:00
SATA 300 is commonly mis-named "SATA 2" . You should be able to use any standard SSD with a 2.5 to 3.5" adapter bracket.
Swatboss
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December 4th, 2012 21:00
I just attempted to install a Samsung 830 128GB. After about 6-8hrs of patient struggling, I gave up. Part of the registry must be adjusted just to turn on the ability to recognize the SSD, Once it is recognized, it's almost impossible to reinstall such an old version of Windows Vista (if this is what you are using) because there are so many updates that errors installing are prominant. After about 4hrs I finally was able to install Windows, and it ran fine... On update #22 of 100+ (first update check) Windows Update froze. PC was still useable, but Update wouldn't budge for over an hour. I finally cancelled installing updates, and restarting Update with no progress for another half hour. I finally restarted the PC, and got a nasty little black screen stating that no OS could be found. After another half hour of piddling, I finally started reinstalling Windows all over again, and just said screw it. I used the SSD to just be a secondary drive, and make a few programs run faster, but after a few seconds of writing, BSOD's became common. There is a chance it is the SSD, but I found several forums with people using older "proprietary" systems like Dell, Gateway, etc that were having the same issues with other brands/types of SSD's. My personal opinion is that since there hasn't been a BIOS update in over 5 years with 1.1.11 in 2007, and the fact that that particular version is full of bugs anyway, that this old machine just can't handle some of these newer technologies. If I had the extra money lying around, there are a couple things I would try before giving up completely...
#1 - Purchase a highly rated, high quality mirroring software, uninstall most of the programs off of your HDD boot drive, and mirror the rest onto the SSD.. thus bypassing the need for all the updates to your OS (Norton Ghost, and Samsung's Migration software were both a bust on my attempts)
#2 - instead of an SSD drive, purchase an SSD Cache drive. The accompanying software allows the SSD to Cache for your HDD's giving them SSD-like performance with HDD capacity... all without having to reinstall windows or any heavy duty procedures like that. Once again... not sure if the e521 BIOS/system can handle it, but it's a less invasive surgery than a full fresh SSD install.
Good Luck!
Swatboss
Dell Dimension E521 (Athlon64 2.0Ghz, 1GB-533Mhz DDR2, 120GB HDD) Vista Home Premium 32-Bit
Upgraded to:
Athlon64x2 2.0Ghz, 4GB-800Mhz DDR2, 250GB HDD Boot, 500GB HDD storage, Nvidea Gforce 9400GT