geofelt said:
You will be very pleased with converting to SSD.
I see two issues.
1. 6gb sata will let the SSD do faster sequential data transfers compared to 3g sata. But, a SSD even on slower sata will still be faster than your current hard drive. More importantly, most of what we do is small random I/O and that is not impacted by sata speeds. Net... not to worry about performance.
2. Trim is the ability of a ssd to intelligently manage blocks of nand by avoiding unnecessary updates. A SSD has a finite number of updates per nand block. Without AHCI, you limit the ability to transmit trim commands to the ssd. But to put this in perspective, it takes a VERY active update frequency like those found in a server environment to run out of updates. Even if you ever do, the drive can still be read so you could clone to a fresh ssd. Practically speaking, your ssd will be long opsolete before you ever have a problem.
Both 1. and 2. issues can be helped by buying a larger ssd than you need. More nand blocks will insulate you from running out of updates. And more nand blocks can be read in parallel, helping sequential performance.
In your case, The longer endurance of the Samsung PRO version is probably worth the extra cost.
Thanks geofelt. If I leave the BIOS setting to RAID, is there a way to enable "trim" such as installing drivers or a utility etc? Good suggestion about ordering larger than needed drive. I'm leaning toward the Samsung PRO. Related to these issues, should the paging file be set to reside on the SSD along with the OS? Presumably that's better than using a spinning drive or an external USB thumb drive, but wouldn't it result in a lot more reads/writes?