I was having some issues with my 6 year old Dell XPS8700 and I attributed to a failing HD. So, I replaced the C drive with a 500 GB SSD and since it was open and exposed, I added 16 GB of ram for a total of 24 gb as well as an additional 1T hard drive.

I can't believe the difference in performance. Boot time is down to about 15 seconds and it's very speedy. Well worth the cost and effort. $160 for the SSD, $90 for the 1T HD and about $120 for the RAM since I replaced all of the modals instead of mixing the brands.

I could have gone with a smaller SSD since all I have on there is the OP system and programs (about 225 GB) but the cost was not that much difference.

If you've got a desktop that seems to be slowing down, I highly recommend a SSD boot drive.

Tru' dat', Dawg.

H&K-Guy

Excellent upgrade choice! On a side note...members - please backup your files/documents/pictures/videos on a regular basis. One is none, 2 is One, 3 is Two.

Yup...Good advice NavyGuy!

I totally redid my "Media Server" with SSD's, loaded it with Win10, and bumped up the RAM to 24gb (limited to 16gb in my previous Win 7 Home Premium). I already had a plethora of 1TB drives in the HDD rack, so I configured those in a RAID to make 4TB of drive space for downloaded movies and shows. System runs GREAT!! Except for that little Xfinity/Adobe Flash issue I'm having with MS Edge......

I added Intel Optane drive to mine. Boots in 10 seconds, programs open twice as fast. It's a new type of memory that stores certain files used most often to speed loading. Problem with it is you need 7th gen Intel chip, 200 or higher chipset, and latest BIOS. Very few computers can use it. I love mine though.

quote:

Originally posted by Skins2881:
I added Intel Optane drive to mine. Boots in 10 seconds, programs open twice as fast. It's a new type of memory that stores certain files used most often to speed loading. Problem with it is you need 7th gen Intel chip, 200 or higher chipset, and latest BIOS. Very few computers can use it. I love mine though.

Optane drive is only useful if you are still using a spinner HD as a primary drive. Adds zero value if you have a current SSD as your OS drive already. No different in idea from the hybrid spinner drives with a small data-caching SSD built into them.

Did the same thing to my desktop just with a 256gb SSD. And if you have your backups configured correctly, you can restore that primary drive (or spinning backup drive) in a flash should you ever need to instead of jumping through the hoops of reinstalling Windows and all your application software.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: bigdeal,

quote:

Originally posted by Xer0:

Optane drive is only useful if you are still using a spinner HD as a primary drive. Adds zero value if you have a current SSD as your OS drive already. No different in idea from the hybrid spinner drives with a small data-caching SSD built into them.

Partially true.

No noticeable improvement over a fast SSD like a new NVMe that uses multiple PCIe 3.0 lanes.

If you are using a traditional Sata 3 SSD drive, then you are pretty much only pushing 400-600 MB per second.

I'm at the point where I notice the SSD as a bottleneck moving large video and image files around, so I'll be going into a 4 lane NVMe next.

quote:

Originally posted by Xer0:

quote:

Originally posted by Skins2881:
I added Intel Optane drive to mine. Boots in 10 seconds, programs open twice as fast. It's a new type of memory that stores certain files used most often to speed loading. Problem with it is you need 7th gen Intel chip, 200 or higher chipset, and latest BIOS. Very few computers can use it. I love mine though.

Optane drive is only useful if you are still using a spinner HD as a primary drive. Adds zero value if you have a current SSD as your OS drive already. No different in idea from the hybrid spinner drives with a small data-caching SSD built into them.

You are correct, it's a poor man's SSD. It was $79, vs $250. For me who's computer usage is SIGforum, Excel, and Bill pay it does what I need which is speed up the slug that is Win10.

I got a steal on a computer from Dell Outlet that was for some reason missing it's SSD, but otherwise was top of the line. Worked out perfectly. Very few others would end up in a position that they'd have a computer with the specs mine does without SSD.

quote:

Originally posted by Aeteocles:

quote:

Originally posted by Xer0:

Optane drive is only useful if you are still using a spinner HD as a primary drive. Adds zero value if you have a current SSD as your OS drive already. No different in idea from the hybrid spinner drives with a small data-caching SSD built into them.

Partially true.

No noticeable improvement over a fast SSD like a new NVMe that uses multiple PCIe 3.0 lanes.

If you are using a traditional Sata 3 SSD drive, then you are pretty much only pushing 400-600 MB per second.

I'm at the point where I notice the SSD as a bottleneck moving large video and image files around, so I'll be going into a 4 lane NVMe next.

Completely true.. The Intel M.2 Optane drives are intelligent "caching" drives. It's optimized for caching small file system OS random access, and "caches" commonly used data. It is also relatively small at 32GB-64GB. Hence when one is working with large video and image files, it's NOT going to cache them like it does system OS files and is not going to improve access or read times.

Unless you are confusing the small caching Optane drives with the Optane series of PCIe SSD's, which is a whole different beast that the common user is never going to have in their home PC.

FYI: SATA 3 spec and drivers are so well optimized that even with much less overall throughput capability, is much better at small file random file access latency (like OS files), than PCIe or NVME drives.