maybe a silly question

Sorry if it is. Just looking to upgrade my HDD to an SSD. The motherboard it will be paired to is an asus p7h55-m (ancient I know). My question is can I use any SSD or should I be using a SSD on the aproved vendor list Asus hand out? Also what should I look for when buying an SSD? tHANKS

As long as it's a SATA device you should be fine.

Look at reviews and at that it can be hit and miss so it's really a general consensus. I use this page to help gauge things. www.fakespot.com Then I search for the cheapest price from different retailers.

As far as the type of SSD you should get, like mentioned, if you have a SATA interface it will work. But something like M.2 is a different animal.

Remember to turn of auto defrag in the OS, and never defrag a SSD. Also enable TRIM. You may also want to over provision. Some SSD manufactures like Crucial or Samsung have there own SSD tools to do that. Then you should make sure the SSD is using AHCI in BIOS and is aligned.


Read!

https://www.howtogeek.com/257196/ho...nabled-for-your-ssd-and-enable-it-if-it-isnt/


https://hetmanrecovery.com/recovery...-in-the-bios-without-reinstalling-windows.htm

https://www.easeus.com/partition-master/how-to-align-ssd-after-clone.html

An alternative. https://www.howtogeek.com/270358/ho...id-state-drive-by-re-aligning-its-partitions/

Agent Smith said:

As far as the type of SSD you should get, like mentioned, if you have a SATA interface it will work. But something like M.2 is a different animal.

Click to expand...

The OPs motherboard is old enough that m.2 was a distant dream, so SATA based drives are the only option without a pcie card that adds the interface.

Cromewell said:

The OPs motherboard is old enough that m.2 was a distant dream, so SATA based drives are the only option without a pcie card that adds the interface.

Click to expand...

Even with a pcie card, it would still need to be on a sata controller. NVME is only supported on z97 chipset or newer.

Sata m.2 ssds are not worth the premium unless that's the only form factor you can use.