SSD MoBo Compatibility

You have an older AMD motherboard with AMD chipsets that do not properly support modern 3rd generation SATA 3 6Gb/s solid state drives. It was released on September 9th, 2011 and is no longer in production. Luckily modern ssd's are backwards compatible but you will have to settle for SATA 2 3Gb/s ssd performance or less. You will also have to download and install the latest AMD Chipset drivers, AMD ACHI drivers, and BIOS updates from the Gigabyte web site in order for the ssd to work.

I normally recommend Samsung solid state drives. They perform very well and have a proven track record. You mentioned HHD/SSD performance comparisons. The ones for Samsung ssd's are no longer valid. Samsung released their "rapid mode" technology which increases performance. I have a Samsung 840 EVO 256GB ssd with rapid mode enabled in my personal pc. Here are my results using the Samsung SSD magician to measure the performance:

Sequential Read: 1,190 MB/s
Sequential Write: 1,041 MB/s
Random Read: 101,229 IOPS
Random Write: 132,953 IOPS

Essentially Samsung uses 1GB of DDR3 system memory as a cache. It reminds me a lot of the old "ramdisks" that use system memory to create a virtual disk. It might be a problem for systems with just 4GB of system memory as that would only leave 3GB for the operating system and the rest of the pc. Samsung has already announced that they will eventually release versions that could use additional system memory. It appears to be good new for consumers who installed more memory than they actually need.

I maintain the ssd database listed in a sticky at the very top of this forum section. Here is the link:

http://www.johnnylucky.org/data-storage/ssd-database.html

Scroll down to the brands and models you are interested in and follow the links to the technical reviews.

I also recommend a fresh clean install of the operating system. Although data migration applications work reasonably well for the majority of users, sometimes things go wrong. We've had quite a few threads about data migration problems. In addition, there is no need or reason to partition the ssd. If you are installing Microsoft Windows you can let Windows prepare the ssd automatically during installation. No muss! No fuss! No bother!

cin19 has already provided you with links to a large collection of useful articles that should help you with ssd installation and maintenance.

The SATAIII is backward compatible to SATAII, also you will not notice the difference in real world between the SSD in SATAII or SATAIII, http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-upgrade-sata-3gbps,3469.html and I don't recommend to buy the add-on controller card, 1) Only get the high price card then you can get the same performance, it does not worth it. 2) Not all the card can't work well, even the manufacturer said it is compatible but you can find a lot of them can't.