SSD installation questions

You're not alone with these questions - SSDs have come down in cost per GB so a lot of people have been taking advantage of some of the deals on the market. I have deployed a lot of these over the last 5 years, and based on the experiences I have had I usually look at Crucial, Intel & Samsung when selecting a drive for a build. All 3 of those brands are incredibly reliable - all things being equal, Samsung is the best blend of price, reliability and performance so I usually pickup either their 840 or 850 series and select the size and drive based on the build. If all you're going to do is install your operating system and basic programs on your drive, that the 120GB models should be more than sufficient. If you're a gamer and like to keep all your games installed on your system, I might recommend going with a 250GB model. I use the 256GB 840 Pro in my desktop at home in combination with a 3 TB HDD for all my media files - it's truly the best of both world: transferring data from my SSD to my HDD is fast and I have plenty of space to keep all my files without having to worry about what needs to be deleted to make room.

If this is for a new computer build that does not have windows installed, you will want to connect your SSD to your tower and disconnect your HDD before the windows install. This is because if both drives are connected, Windows will write MBR files to both drives making them both necessary to run windows. That means if your hard drive fails, you won't be able to boot windows. Also, if you've installed windows on that hard drive previously, I would probably recommend copying over any files you want to save and wiping it before connecting it to your new system. Once windows is fully installed, you can connect your hard drive.

As far as what your motherboard supports, it more than likely has both SATA II (3Gb/s) & SATA III (6Gb/s) ports - if you post your model number, we can check for you but it was likely included on the specs. The ports are backwards compatible, but it does affect read/write times so if you plug a SSD into a SATA II port you will likely not be able to get the read/write speeds it's been benchmarked with. Not a big deal, half the read/write speed is still way better than you could expect from any 7200RPM HDD