Looking at pepping up an older laptop. Its 2mb ram which i will increase to 4, its upper limit.

Any brand of ssd i should buy or avoid?

Dont think there are any definitely avoid ones that I know of. Mine is a Samsung got it because it was the best selling model and it came up on sale. But brands such as Crucial, Sandisk, Kingston, WD will all be fine.

Only other advice is go for 250ish rather than 120ish if you want a bit of spare storage as Windows will take up about 50GB

Samsung Evo.
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Samsung is good, they’ve giving away free games at the moment with purchase too which you could sell to off-set the cost I suppose.

Western Digital are also good, Kingston tbh avoid any non/branded or anything from a slightly dodgy source and you’ll be fine. They all seem to be thin enough not to worry about needing a 7mm one.

I bought a Samsung SSD for my Dad’s ageing laptop and he says it’s like a brand new computer again.

They are all pretty good these days compared to how it was a few years back, just look for the best deal

Be aware that SSD performance is taking a hit from the Meltdown and Sceptre security fixes bandaids that are incoming for Intel CPUs produced over the last ~10 years.

Samsung Evo (840 or something).

The single best thing I could do to my mid 2010 MacBook to speed it up.

Put a Kingston one in my now 7 year old laptop a few years ago. Transformed it. When windows 10 came along and the ‘upgrade’ failed I installed Linux Mint and haven’t looked back.

Depends what your using it for, how much drive space are you currently using?

I put a £50 120gb Kingston drive in my nans pc, as that’s plenty of space for her usage.

Personally I have a 250gb Samsung drive as like to have a couple of games installed on the fast ssd, and a couple of other drives for general storage.

Whatever size you choose it will make a nice difference to performance.

I’ve never had a bad SSD, and I’ve used super cheap Chinese unbranded all the way up to Samsung Evo.

Yes you will see a slight amount of difference with the slightly more expensive units, but if you are coming from a non SSD laptop, it will be a massive improvement anyway.

However, having said that this is a great price – ARIA

Buy that!

SATA USB connector also required if you’re moving data around or cloning. Some SSD kits bundle them.

However, having said that this is a great price – ARIA

Still quite a bit cheaper at Amazon after you’ve added aria postage.

A Kingston 256Gb one was put into my sons aging laptop, and a new Win10 install. Honestly, even though it’s now 6 years old, it is the fasting booting computer I’ve ever seen.

Worth noting…Performance will depend on interface, ideally you should have SATA III, serial ATA II interface will limit speed to under 300MB/s whilst a decent SSD will do around 500MB/s on SATA III.

Worth noting…Performance will depend on interface, ideally you should have SATA III, serial ATA II interface will limit speed to under 300MB/s whilst a decent SSD will do around 500MB/s on SATA III.

It is worth noting, but that shouldn’t put you off upgrading to an SSD, as it will still improve the performance of the unit, just not to the drives full potential (& I wouldn’t recommend buying a top quality drive if this is the case). Crucial’s upgrade checker will tell you this information
That said I’d assume a 3 year old laptop should be sata3

dirtydog – Member
Worth noting…Performance will depend on interface, ideally you should have SATA III, serial ATA II interface will limit speed to under 300MB/s whilst a decent SSD will do around 500MB/s on SATA III.

True, however the real win from SSDs compared to hard drives comes from their performance on random small size requests rather than sequential performance, and if you can get near 300MB/s on random I/O then you are doing well.

So long story short, yes you may lose a bit of sequential performance (file copying, saving huge files etc) on a SATA2 interface, the computer will still feel a metric shit-tonne faster in general day to day usage. 🙂